I've been evaluating two ways of reading aggregated syndication feeds: Radio Userland's built-in aggregator and NetNewsWire. To skip the suspense, NNW won. I used Radio extensively for the last three days, posting and reading content. With Radio running on my downstairs server (see this), response time was fast and reading news was a little easier, since I use the traditional view in NNW and Radio's layout puts all of the news on one page.
This brings me to the reason I shut of Radio's aggregator this morning. I read news by scanning the content, then reviewing interesting stories, then posting the content afterwards. With Radio's aggregator, that just wasn't possible. I subscribe to 92 sources and that makes managing headlines in Radio unwieldy.
I'm hoping that when I learn a bit more about Radio/Frontier/Manila, I can create a read-only aggregator page that's tailored to my needs.
Update: Brent Simmons (creator of NNW writes):
[snip]
The thing to remember is that the distinction between aggregator types isn[base ']t between mail-reader style and weblog-style, it[base ']s between GUI apps and browser-based apps. Dave writes: [base “]People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something.[per thou]
Actually, no, they[base ']re not. [inessential.com]