With Web sites (and therefore Web updates) multiplying into existence every day, savvy members of the online news and blogging world have been keeping their updates streamlined with RSS feeds. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, lets you subscribe to as many automated update feeds as you like; RSS aggregators let you gather all those newsfeeds into one place.

RSS is a great tool when you don’t have time to visit each and every one of the sites you’d like to keep up on, and there are plenty of options out there to read and organize your newsfeeds. Here’s a little help differentiating among the various sizes and shapes of RSS aggregators.

Online Aggregators: Some RSS readers are online services, which have the advantage of being accessible from any computer (and from any platform). Perhaps the most famous of these is the one built in to My Yahoo, though the options range from various Web homepages, such as Yahoo! and iGoogle, to (usually free) subscription services like Bloglines and CNET’s Newsburst.

Online aggregators are ideal for casual or beginning RSS users who want to gather a few newsfeeds or website updates, but don’t need a separate full-time tool to manage them. Many of them can also be used right from your online homepage. But while they are highly portable and generally easier to use, online RSS readers tend to be less full-featured than the next two types.

Offline (Standalone) Aggregators: If you’re looking for advanced organizational tools or need to manage a huge number of RSS feeds, a standalone software reader is probably the best bet. These dedicated programs operate from your desktop and can easily manage hundreds of feeds.

As with many things in life, you’ll have to pay for some of the best standalone aggregators, such as FeedDemon for Windows or its cousin NetNewsWire for Mac. However, there are plenty of free and open-source alternatives out there: popular reader Awasu is available for download in both a free and advanced paid version, and open-source RSS clients like BlogBridge and RSSOwl can be found with a bit of searching.

Built-In Aggregators and Plug-Ins: Built-in aggregators function as a complement to an established program, usually your desktop email client or Web browser. These come in just about every flavor and for every popular browser, and are even built into some surprising places -— like my BitTorrent client, microTorrent. A few more common examples are NewsGator Inbox, which works with Microsoft Outlook; Pluck, which works with Microsoft Internet Explorer; and Sage, a proprietary Mozilla creation for Firefox.

If you’re already heavily attached to your email client or just want a smoother browsing-to-reader transition while you’re on the Web, you might want to consider downloading one of these plug-ins as a quick and easy RSS solution.

Pre-Reader Filters: One of the newest trends in RSS is the development of services that let you design and customize your own combinations of RSS feeds. These combos allow you to organize various feed subscriptions around a single topic or keyword. Feedster.com and the brand-new Yahoo! Pipes are two examples of this kind of service. You’ll still need a separate RSS reader to use it, but with these tools, you don’t need to worry about what kind of organizational (selecting and filtering) features your RSS reader has. You can design pre-organized feeds yourself.

To be continued in Part 2: Comparing RSS readers, feature by feature…

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