For a variety of personal and professional reasons I've been in a bit of a mess keeping up to date with the river of news over the last month or two. I decided to switch RSS readers as a trigger to getting both organized and up to date. Rather than do any extensive research, I decided to follow the expert. I couldn't raise David Tebbutt, but a quick search around his blogs and forums revealed he's currently using GreatNews (having previously used Bloglines, Newsgator and then BlogBridge which I am switching from). I did a quick scan of their site and took the plunge.

GreatNews is a free, fast and efficient RSS feed reader from Curio Studio (but only available for Windows I'm afraid). Like most readers it allows you to organize feeds in to groups on the left and reading pane on the right, but once in a group you can easily switch to a full page view. It offers various different layout styles, but the one I like is the newspaper view where you can scan the articles in two columns. You keep paging through the new articles for each feed, and skip on to the next feed. A click on a feed title will take you to view the actual blog entry, but inside GreatNews' own browser. You can configure features like e-mail this, Blog this, Del.icio.us, and Furl so they are just a click away under each article. It integrates with Windows Live Writer amongst other blog editors. Other features include import/export feeds from/to OPML and XML files, and automatic cleanup of old items. I'm sure it has loads of stuff I haven't found yet.

One thing that is possible, but I haven't tried is that you could install the software on a memory stick so that you could plug in to any Internet connected PC, update all of your feeds, and then read them from the memory stick on your disconnected laptop at your leisure.

I've only been playing with it today, and I've already done more surfing, reading, collecting new ideas and material than I've done in ages, which is what it's all about.