RSS Owl

If you are looking for a good RSS reader, or a way to collect up content from all the many websites you check daily (or if your just curious about RSS/Atom/XML feeds) then RSS Owl is a good program to check out. RSS Owl is a fairly powerful, yet usable RSS newsreader for most operating systems (java based). Typically, all you have to do is go to the tools menu and "Discover Newsfeeds on a website" and enter the URL of the website in question (assuming it has a discoverable RSS feed). RSS Owl also has a nice tutorial to get you started. When you get all your sites entered in, you end up with a nice list of posts from each site, usually in a cleaned up form (no backgrounds/ads/flash/junk), similar to reading email. This can save a lot of time if you check a lot of sites. If you own a PocketPC or other mobile device, you may want to look into a RSS reader for it as well (simply export from your desktop to an opml file) so you can read your feeds on the go. If you aren't already using RSS, you should really give it a try, especially since many sites are providing feeds at this point.

If anyone else has a favorite RSS reader, I would be interested to hear about it, feel free to post in the comments. I normally use Liferea, but it is Linux only, so I have also used RSS Owl and usually recommend it to friends.