I’m a bit of a news junkie, and as such, I tend to use RSS feeds to keep up with what’s going on. I’m typically a NetNewsWire guy, and I think it’s nearly perfect. However, one of the problems I think all RSS readers suffer from is the entire idea of RSS feeds – the more of them you subscribe to, the more difficult it is to stay on top of the news that you actually want to read. You get overloaded with yet another thing to keep up with, and eventually you give up (or cut the list of feeds you read down to the bare minimum).

Thankfully, Shaun Inman has come up with a pretty neat way to solve this issue, with his new web based rss reader, Fever. What Fever does differently from the other guys is it asks you to keep your feeds in two separate groups: Kindling and Sparks. All that means is that the Sparks are the feeds you subscribe to but maybe don’t read every entry (Andrew Sullivan, CNN, Engadget, other ‘high volume’ posting sites), and the Kindling are the MUST read sites (for me, Daring Fireball, Marco Arment’s blog, etc). Fever then compares what the Sparks are linking to, and if they’re linking to things in your Kindling feeds, those items get ‘heated up’ and are pushed to the top. In a sense, you’re creating your own Techmeme but for the sites you personally care about. Pretty neat!

It’s a $30 one time fee, and you host it yourself, so you’re not relying on a company to stay in business to continue using it. I think it’s worth every penny, and it’s been a fantastic addition to my workflow. I highly recommend checking it out at feedafever.com.

Update: I’ve been using it for about a week now. It’s absolutely fantastic. The interface is as clean and simple as it gets, and I’ve found that I’m actually keeping up with more content than I was previously. What a great app.