I’ve complained several times that the current RSS aggregator I’m using — Radio Userland — doesn’t have any way to categorize the dozens of RSS feeds I’m monitoring and, unfortunately, what looks like the aggregator with the featureset I want is only available on the Macintosh.
The upside is that people seem to be developing new RSS aggregators right and left so there are plenty of ones to choose from that come close to what I want. The best I’ve come across so far for Windows is BlogExpress which has the advantage of also being free (with a donation suggested).
BlogExpress is almost perfect. It is built on top of Internet Explorer and lets me do most of what I want — I can create categories and subcategories for the various RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. It can give me a category level look at how many new items there are on each RSS feed, but alas it cannot yet aggregate all of the feeds under, say, the Africa category, and simply show me in one page all of the new stories in all of the RSS feeds I’ve tagged as being about Africa. That’s what I’m really after.
BlogExpress uses a tabbed interface much like Mozilla, so new stories I click on in the aggregator pane show up as new tabs. Works great, but I’m spoiled by Firebird’s ability to background load new tabs which I find a much better way of opening new tabs, especially when I’m going through a list of 20-30 stories I might want to open.