A ‘news reader’, ‘news aggregator’ or ‘feed reader’ is software retrieves the latest web content from your favorite sites. News readers greatly reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or “personal newspaper.”

How do news readers work?

Once subscribed to a feed, a news reader or ‘aggregator’ is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the updates.

To find the news reader best suited for you, you may wish to take a look at C-Net’s Download.com page on Feed Readers . You can sort the search results according to reviews by users or professionals, by free, demo or shareware licensing.

A popular RSS Read is Active Web Reader 2.45. Rated highly by both users and C-Net professionals, Active Web Reader 2.45 allows you to see only unread highlights from your favorite sites and other new feeds of your choice.

Adding a news feed to a news reader

Throughout this site you’ll see icons like this: in the top, right portion of your browser, depending on which part of the site you are viewing.

You can use the main site RSS to get all updates pulled to your news reader, or use a category feed if you want only updates from that category. If you simply want to follow the comments of an interesting article, then use the located on that article’s page.
Just click on the feed icon of your choice and you’ll be taken to the feed page. On that feed page, copy the address information in your browser as shown in the picture below:

Then paste the feed address into your news reader program or online service. There are also links to many of the popular bookmarking services for those of you familiar with tracking your favorite sites that way.

a note for all newer browser users:

Newer browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 1.5 will show an error message if you try to click on the feed links. Instead, right-click on the links of the feed(s) you want to add to your favorite feed reader and copy the link location (’shortut’ in IE). Then paste it into your feed reader as mentioned above.