Vienna is a very promising free RSS reader for Macosx. It’s got your typical 3-paned interface, which you can set to three vertical panes or the more traditional 1 left, 2 stacked on the right interface you see in things like mail.app or outlook. It’s a little rough around the edges, especially in the interface department (lack of command keys being my chief complaint) but it’s small and fast and has two really great features – first, it’s pretty simple to re-style the visual appearance of the feeds using html and css. Second and even better is the ability to create what it calls ‘smart folders’ – these are meta-feeds which are created by parsing the contents of all your feeds and creating a new one based on a very comprehensive set of filters. This is a feature I love in FeedDemon, and Vienna’s implementation is superior. To give you an example of how this works, in FeedDemon I have a filterset that watches for any occurrence of a set of terms related to diabetes, and every day I look over the output it produces, allowing me to take in at a glance all the research that’s been published on the subject plus every mention across the so-called blogosphere and in the mainstream press, every day. The usefulness of this can’t be overstated, and Vienna is one of the few RSS readers to add this feature – to my knowledge netnewswire is the only other one on the mac that has this. If you’re on a mac and haven’t paid for netnewswire yet, this is well worth checking out. More generally, if you’re not yet using rss to help you absorb info more efficiently, you’re wasting your own time. Get an RSS reader and spend a few hours figuring out how to work with it, your brain will thank you.