RSS Feeds and Syndication

The Basics 

Wikipedia Explains Some Key Terms

atom

atom is an IETF proposed standard format for web syndication.
(Neither IETF nor W3C has any authority to regulate third-party web use, hence they merely propose standards)

RSS

RSS is a file format with a lot of alternative names, "Real Simple Syndication" being the most common. It is the de facto standard for web syndication, although some (e.g. blogspot.com) prefer atom

Web Feed

A web feed, or syndicated content, consists of some web content plus the necessary information for a program or website to properly display that content, also referred to as meta-content or meta-information.

Web Syndication

Web Syndication is the process of providing web content via a web feed, usually as an XML file (either RSS or atom).

XML

eXtensible Mark-up Language, like HTML, is a flavor of SGML. It is widely used to distribute web content, plus certain meta-information, via web feeds.

Online News Aggregators 

Attensa Online

Attensa was down for unscheduled maintenance (crashed) following some favorable publicity and an avalanche of traffic, but they're back now. The service is a "no frills" aggregator with an attractive user interface and its very fast. Good service.

Bloglines

I like Bloglines because it will accept feeds in almost any format available. If I could only have one online aggregator account, this would probably be the one. Bloglines is owned and operated by Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves)

Google Reader

Google is one of the fastest aggregators, if that's important to you. I dislike their user interface, which by default requires a lot of mousing to display content. It's configurable to some degree, but so far I haven't been able to tweak it into anything I really like.

Grit

Gritwire is an attractive featureful newsreader / persoanl homepage, but since all of it's modules are feed-related, we're treating it as a straight newsreader. Still testing, but it seems to be pretty good.

News Alloy

News Alloy is a new service, currently in beta testing. It seems to be pretty fast, and has a nice set of features, which are subject to upgrade without notice. Worth a look.

Newsgator Online

Newsgator has a clean simple interface without a lot of frills, some nice in-house feeds, and a blogroll feature that is worth the price of admission (free).

Pluck RSS Reader

Pluck's user interface seems counter-intuitive to me, but I'll have to fool with it some more before I give it a thumbs-down. The Online service is teamed with a separate social-bookmarking service called Shadows which seems similarly obtuse to me. Their Sign-in page is annoyingly hard to find, too.

Rojo

Rojo rhymes with "Mojo" not "Soho."
It's a good news aggregator with a lot of features I haven't really explored yet. Many prefer it.

Virtual Desktop Applications / Portals 

Squidoo

Squidoo is first and foremost a free blogspace provider, with an interesting business plan that rewards bloggers (lensmasters) for popular content.

It features a module that makes it very easy to incorporate feeds into a page without any knowledge of HTML, and social bookmarking service. Oddly the bookmark links can't be added to Squiddo "lenses", which don't support Javascript.

My Yahoo!

My Yahoo! is a portal that features some RSS support, but doesn't do well at all with atom. Still, if you want your pages indexed by Yahoo! this is an important resource.

newsburst

newsburst

myAOL

???

NetVibes

???

Further Reading 

The State of Online Feed Readers

Useful Links 

(Temporary)

Yahoo! RSS for Publishers

Good list of sources