The best way to keep up to date with your favorite sites and blogs is by monitoring their RSS or Atom feeds with a News Aggregator. As far as application-based news aggregators go, my favorite is RSSOwl. But, if having a separate application isn’t your cup of tea, then you’ll probably be delighted to know that Safari, Firefox, and Thunderbird can double as news aggregators. Of course, if you read your feeds in more than one location (for example, at home and at work), then you may want to use a web-based news aggregator. Currently, my favorite web-based news aggregators are Bloglines and NewsGator.

I’m out of new Favored Freeware entries for now, so I have decided to list off all of the cross-platform Favored Freeware applications in this week’s entry. Developing a cross-platform application means a lot. It means that you, the developer(s), are willing to go above and beyond the call of duty in order to please a much broader audience by providing your application(s) for more than one platform. As of now, my cross-platform Favored Freeware applications are: Audacity, Celestia, Firefox, iTunes, Mactracker, NVU, QuickTime, RSSOwl, Thunderbird, Tux Paint, VLC Media Player, and Web Developer Extension.