I was looking for a solution to my need to keep up with contributing to Microsoft newsgroups and staying current with the technical information that is out there. I have been procrastinating using RSS for no reason in particular other than I figured I'll get to it...
As it turns out, many of the resources I'll need as a consultant are community based and I need to use both of these technologies to be effective. Generally speaking, I don't like installing all sorts of applications willy nilly so I looked to my peers and what was available for help. I can use Outlook for RSS but it does not use NNTP. I can use Windows Mail for NNTP but it does not support RSS... My peers also suggested a combination of those and some suggested RSS Bandit for the RSS reader which I tried and it works well enough and Live Mail for the news reader which I have yet to try.
Then I Skyped my buddy Pete Zerger from Oklahoma and asked him since he is nerdy like me and we both try to stay current in our own ways.. He told me about OMEA reader from http://www.jetbrains.com.
Finally! Both tools in one... This Java based reader can use browsing functions for your web needs and can store contacts (I have not looked into this functionality very much...) but what appealed to me is teh ability to read both RSS feeds and newsgroups in the same program. That made it worthwhile. The software is free too and very intuitive to use and be productive by the way!