I've never been an avid news reader but with the advent of blogging all this change and like many others I started a quest just the right RSS Newsreader. For the uninitiated RSS is a simple XML based technology by which content (normally text but not limited to) is published in a machine readable format. For more information on RSS check out Wikipedia's RSS page. News readers are the programs that automatically poll RSS files to retrieve their content to facilitate the delivery of information to the user. The primary advantage of RSS is that it is an information pushing technology which means that information is sent to the user not waiting for the user to fetch the information himself.

Newsgator - Newsgator was my first RSS love and I've been loyal to it since the times when RSS was as popular as my mom. The one and only reason I use Newsgator is its formidable integration with Outlook which makes reading news as easy as reading e-mail, with the additional advantage of not giving any clue to your manager that you're reading blogs at work. I tried the web version of Newsgator a couple of times but it was too slow for my tastes.

Pluck - Pluck is my weapon of choice at home where I prefer using a web based internet reader. This was one of the first web based readers I tried and since then I didn't feel the need to change. The advantage pluck has over other readers is its extensions that integrate with IE or Firefox thus making it much faster than other web readers with the additional functionality browser components can provide. Recently I was about to ditch pluck because of some very annoying problems with the Firefox extension but as soon as I tried the new Windows version (Pluck 2.0) I reconsidered. This is the only reason I still use IE but it's a damn good reason.

Google Reader - Google Reader was the contender against pluck when I was looking for an alternative but the functionality of Google's solution wasn't anywhere near that offered by Pluck.

FeedLounge - I've read about FeedLounge in Rand's Information Report and the screen shots on the main site look pretty promising. I think it might appeal for people who're still looking for a good reader.

Digg - For me, digg is a crossbreed between a content aggregator and social bookmarking application, and even if it isn't a news reader per se it still fits in the category of news delivery. You can use digg in two ways; say you found a really cool technology related article and you want others to know about it, all you've got to do is digg the article by submitting the article's URL to digg. Other people then go digging for news and see the article that you posted, if they like it then they digg it too to increase its rating. If on the other hand you want to know what are the hottest tech articles at the moment just go into the digg main page and check out the articles with the highest hits. Really Nifty!

Standalone readers - I'm not a big fan of standalone readers like Feeddemon and co. as I already have enough applications running simultaneously. Standalone readers might appeal for dedicated news lovers without serious levels of NADD.

Do you think that the news reader you use is better than these? Go ahead and post your comments.