Beauty is not alone in the eye of the beholder—ugly is there too. Behold most RSS aggregator/readers, and you'll get an eyeful of ugly. Not so with FeedDemon 2.0. It starts with a look and feel similar to Microsoft Outlook 2003, but with a much prettier interface that's tailored to managing RSS feeds.

RSS sends info on the latest blog or Website updates directly to you: usually headlines along with a short description and a link. An aggregator/reader does the work of gathering the feeds that interest you and displaying them. You'll find dozens for free—Web-based ones, add-ins, extensions, sidebars, Microsoft Outlook-integrated plug-ins, even standalone software (and plenty more are coming).

So why buy one? Because none of the free alternatives offer the same level of organization and filtering abilities—or breadth of features—as FeedDemon. The product, which NewsGator purchased from Bradsoft.com in May 2005, is simply the most comprehensive, feature-rich, and intuitively organized RSS feed aggregator/reader for Windows. Attensa for Outlook (watch for my review, coming soon) is the only challenger I've seen that even comes close.

This latest version of FeedDemon displays all your feeds ("channels" in FeedDemon parlance) in a single-level Windows Explorer-like "tree view" rather than in a drop-down list like its predecessor. It can keep track of the feeds you read or interact with most and least, which helps a lot in sorting and prioritizing. (Attensa puts feeds into folders it adds to Outlook.)

If you have a free account with NewsGator Online (a service that lets you view your feeds from any Web browser on any PC connected to the Internet), FeedDemon will synchronize with it seamlessly. The software organizes the feeds to match the way they're arranged on your own PC and marks those you've already read—a big benefit. NewsGator Online is certainly convenient, but I tend to get fed up with its slower speed, lack of responsiveness, and missing features as compared with FeedDemon on my PC. Synchronization can't address those complaints, but it helps relieve my ire by making NewsGator easier to use. Serious RSS hounds who want both the benefits of NewsGator Online and access from nearly any device should consider the $19.95 NewsGator Online Premium package.

Within FeedDemon itself you have so many choices—including how to filter, view, sort, flag, and even modify feeds—that it will take you a while to get really comfortable with it all. Here's just a smidgen of what you can do: set up news watches on areas of interest (set keywords that FeedDemon uses to search all incoming feeds), set up news bins (similar to bookmarked favorites in a Web browser), adjust your feed properties (set auto-update frequency, for example, to every 5 minutes, 20 minutes, and so on), adjust folder properties (auto-purge settings based on age of the feed), and enable your NewsGator online feedstation (a podcast receiver) from within FeedDemon so that you can automatically download podcasts to your iPod or Windows Media Player.

With all the ways FeedDemon lets you sort, filter, view, and organize your world of feeds, it's easy to overlook the several different ways you can add new feeds. The simplest is to use the built-in browser to visit a site you know has a feed you want, then grab the feed using the handy icon (the ubiquitous orange RSS logo, with a green plus) in the menu bar. When you aren't at a site, you can use this icon to open up a easy-to-use wizard and enter the feed's URL—or just the Web address of a site you are interested in—and FeedDemon will then attempt to auto-discover feeds available at the site. You can check a box and have the application query you before it automatically subscribes to a feed as well.

One thing about FeedDemon hasn't changed: its amazing combination of simplicity and flexibility that lets you easily organize feeds into folders, sort and share feeds, subscribe to new feeds, and generally manage everything from within a single interface. Keeping track of your feeds (sometimes even seeing them all) is generally much harder in browser-based RSS readers. You'll save money using them, but you'll lose time. If you can't live without your RSS—and a whole lot of it—and you prefer to keep your feeds in a standalone application instead of teasing them out of an Outlook add-in or a browser, the FeedDemon 2.0's $29.95 price tag is a bargain.