A huge portion of “what I do” is ravenously consume information. I consume information about new technologies I might use in my business. I consume information on trends in my industries. I consume information passed along from friends and from industry visionaries. I consume.
As you can imagine, I follow hundreds of RSS feeds. My Mac client of choice is NetNewsWire. I love this app. I love it to pieces. Seriously. Check it out. It syncs with Google Reader and it has a very robust Smart Folders implementation. NNW is entirely integral to my reading.
It is in replacing NNW that I found my second real challenge and my first possible Blocker. At first, I just used Google Reader’s webapp, as I’ve done occasionally even on the Mac. For large scale reading, though, it was a bit inelegant. Smart folders would make things much easier and, since Smart Folders are really just saved searches, you’d think that’d be a Google-thing.
After trying a few readers, including one that was a FireFox extension, I settled on FeedDemon, brought to you by the same fine folks at NewsGator who maintain NNW for Mac. It’s not perfect, as its “Watches” don’t quite replace Smart Folders, but it’s close enough.
