When you want the latest update to an important RSS feed sent to you wherever you are, the moment it's published, give the Notify.me notification web service a try. Set up source feeds in Notify.me and have new items sent to you via instant message or email. I signed up for Notify.me two days ago and got no new items from my feeds for a day; then yesterday afternoon the IM bot kicked in and I was getting notifications of new feed updates faster than my check-every-15-minutes desktop feed reader. Suggested uses for Notify.me include job listings, social network updates, and search feeds.

Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds.

Electronic program guide provider IceTV has embraced RSS in a big way, allowing subscribers to view their upcoming schedule via their preferred RSS reader. You can also save searches (either across the whole guide or within your upcoming shows list) as an RSS feed, useful if you want reminders for irregularly scheduled shows. If you want to access your IceTV on the go, check out its previously mentioned iPhone application.

Tabbloid is a free web based service designed to turn RSS feeds into a PDF newspaper. The web site requires no registration and the process is straight forward. Single or multiple RSS feeds can serve as the source for your PDF. You can opt to have the site compile the PDF immediately or delivery it by email at a future date based on hourly, daily or weekly frequency. In the dozen test feeds I threw at Tabbloid the service performed as advertised, however a few of the feeds generated a glitch that caused the articles to appear in duplicate within the PDF.

Windows only: If you can't always get online to read your feeds, and would prefer to browse more than just post headlines, check out GreatNews. The default browsing view opens up feeds in a two-column, full-post view that's more reminiscent of newspaper site layouts than long lists of post headlines. I had no trouble importing my collection of subscriptions from Mac's NetNewsWire using an OPML file, though it took a long time — even though the product's site declares "GreatNews is extremely fast. Even with hundreds of rss feed subscriptions." For Bloglines users, GreatNews will actually synchronise with your the online feed reader — so that you don't end up reading the same posts twice, and can keep reading even if you aren't connected to the web. Other helpful features include labels for articles, great search functionality and the ability to watch particular sites and keywords to make relevant articles stand out and harder to miss. Any GreatNews users out there willing to share their experiences, good and bad? GreatNews is a free download for Windows. Thanks, CharityAethalides!

Microsoft's Outlook Team Blog walks through how you can customise the RSS feed in Outlook 2007, changing the displayed details for each feed. Although I'm confirmed Outlook addict, I actually prefer Google Reader for feed tracking, but if you do want to keep it all in Outlook, this kind of customisation is appealing.

Click on the "Show Details" link at the top of any feed inside Google Reader, and you'll get a bar chart of how often new posts arrive, and how many you read—this is in addition to the overall subscription information you can get by hitting the Trends link on the top of the left sidebar.

A new report shows use of RSS feeds growing from two to 11 percent in the past three years. The key finding, though, is only 17 percent of the 89 percent who don't use RSS are interested in learning how, indicating a possible peak. What do you see as RSS' main barrier to popularity, and how could it be fixed (or replaced)? [via]

TechCrunch reports that web-based feedreader Bloglines has stopped pulling in updates for "thousands of blogs" with no word from its parent company, Ask.com, about what's going on. We made the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader two years ago. How about you?

Rososo, a free feed reader, takes a backwards track from the majority of RSS-checking tools. The layout is ultra-minimal (and quick-loading), and you add sites by merely typing in their URL or feed address. If they've updated, they show up on your Rososo page—if they haven't since last you checked, they don't. There's no content or even post stubs, just links to check out the sites themselves. Rososo might find use among those advanced users with slow connections or checking on sites only occasionally updated, but it could serve as a "My First Feed Reader" for anyone you're trying to introduce to RSS. Rososo is free to test; saving bookmarks requries a free sign-up.