The vast majority of my readers already know and love the idea of syndication. If you are such a reader, feel free to ignore this post. I've gotten a few questions about the RSS and ATOM links, however, so I thought a brief introduction was in order. (Using RSS just may change your life!)
A good place to start is this article by Walter Mossberg in the WSJ (via Martin).
What is RSS/ATOM?
RSS and ATOM are two "competing" XML languages. Basically, they describe itemized content in a well-understood format that other programs can easily consume. A wide variety of sites offer syndicated feeds today - from personal weblogs to professional news organizations like Wired, CNN and NYTimes.
What is an aggregator?
Web publishing is a broadcast technology. That is, someone publishes something and it's up to you to seek it out.
Syndication changes this a bit. Think of the aggregator as an assistant that collects all new articles you are interested in reading and puts them together in a single newspaper for you each morning. It's one-stop shopping for all your reading needs.
What aggregator should I use?
There are a wide variety of aggregators out there.
Some programs provide aggregation natively. The Mozilla products are prime examples here. Firefox, a popular alternative to Internet Explorer, includes RSS support out of the box (Mr. Mossberg describes this as "live bookmarks"). Thunderbird, a mail client in the suite, also supports RSS natively.
Bloglines is a popular (and free) web-based aggregator recently purchased by Ask Jeeves. You can still read from any device through your web browser, but you only have to go to a single site to do so.
There are also a number of excellent standalone aggregators out there. These desktop aggregators are standalone Windows applications offering rich UI specialized for reading. There are countless options in this category, but I would personally recommend the excellent RSS Bandit (also free).
Personally, I personally use NewsGator. NewsGator offers a Web Edition similar to Bloglines, but I use the Outlook Edition. This allows me to take all of this content into Outlook, my mail reader. I can then search, filter, and flag this web content the same way I would do to an e-mail. Because I run Exchange Server, I also get the web-based benefits through Outlook Web Access.