Thanx for the “descriptive” comment.

My comments about cloud are actually just to fool myself (I’d never be able to leave cloud :( ) . But at least it’s “life, one cloud s/w less”. I’d like to use adobe Air but I don’t. Why? Because it’s “life, one non-free s/w less” :) .

I use Gmail so happily & that means I’m too much cloud spoilt (e-mail is where we keep most private & sensitive stuff & we are happy Google reading our Gmail. Yes we agreed to).

Except on email, I will hardly put my private/sensitive stuff on internet, so in FB, so in twitter.

Brief opens in a separate tab.

I would love snownews if I can get it to work. CLI is heaven. That explains why I love irssi.

I haven’t ever felt that Google gears reliably gets things offline. An again it’s “life, one Google s/w less” :) .

About the reasons you mentioned.
* Bandwidth – You might be correct. It’s Ajaxy, so we don’t know what’s running behind. It’s not a concern for me yet.

* Could madness – I don’t know where you get this idea, perhaps from RMS? ;) Anyway, the truth is we all depend on external providers for various online services starting from e mail, IM to other stuff. So if I’m to worry about cloud madness, I’ll have much more to worry about than my RSS/Atom subscription. My opinion is, if you want to stop depending on external providers or keeping your data 100% inaccessible by other parties,… the only straight forward way is to host your own servers (including storage, connectivity and the whole nine yards). Even shared and VPS hosting services bare you to themselves (in the form of backups and storage usually) up to a certain extent. So I’m not that worried about that aspect about cloud. There is a level of trust involved in almost every online services. When ever I don’t have that trust or have too personal/important things (i.e: my world domination blueprints) I tend to keep that data to myself. :) If you are using Facebook (which I don’t. to date),.. I guess using could apps is nothing you’d have to worry. :D

* Offline reading – This option is available with the Google Gears addon on Firefox. I can only comment about using this feature on Firefox on Linux because that’s what I use.

I used Akregator for a short time before switching to GReader permanently. Mainly for convenience, but also because I use GNOME mainly and Akgregator was the only KDE app I used regularly. I never tried Thunderbird as I’m using Evolution. And I don’t thing I’d switch back to a desktop reader anytime soon.

Thanks for the links and description about the reader options. Especially Brief looks very neat. However it’s a sidebar app. I’m not a big sidebar fan (as I think you are ;) ) I spend most of my time in front of a screen, so I tend to avoid distracting stuff.