I've tried a number of RSS reader solutions over the last few year (gosh, has it been that long since Dave Winer unleashed this on an unsuspecting world) and never really found a 'neat' solution.

But then there was RikReader. I was actually looking for a simple WPF demonstration app when someone Frank pointed me to Dougs wonderful little reader.

Since then it's been one of the first things I fire up when I've got my coffee and some time to catch up with the world of the blogshpere.

RikReader integrates with the Vista RSS platform so when you subscribe to a feed in IE it's immediately available in the reader, and it uses the underlying Vista sync engine so your feeds can be managed in Outlook (actually they seem to have a bug and don't fully sync with the platform at the moment) or using something like NewsGator.

RikReader provides a number of views of the data so you can read blog by blog, river of news or newspaper style. You can also search throughout the feeds for specific keywords or articles.

It's one of those simple (and best of all - free) apps that once you start using you wonder why you didn't discover it sooner...

Oh, and because it's a ClickOnce install and Doug makes pretty frequent updates to the reader keeping up to date is an automated process