A client whose profession is the news media and who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan asked us to set up his home Mac and his BlackBerry with an RSS reader, so that he could keep up with specific blog posts and other news at home in the evenings and on the go.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a standard for sending frequently updated docs such as blogs or news. So if you read 10 blogs every single day, you can use a free or paid RSS reader to pull the content from the 10 blogs, thus giving you one centralized place to read all the blog updates.

This client was in need of such a system, to improve the ease of reading a lot of frequently updated content from different sources.

We set him up with a Google Reader account for RSS, linked to his Google email address. Then we created his custom list of blogs and news he wanted to read every day. We also installed Gruml, a free application for Mac that syncs with Google Reader and allows you to read news/blog feeds, add RSS feeds, tweet, and post articles to social services such as Digg and Facebook.

As he had a BlackBerry and wanted to be able to read RSS feeds while out of the office and away from home, we installed BeReader ($10) which also syncs RSS feeds with Google Reader. It also allows for reading when you’re offline (like on the subway) because it stores the content.

Now he can read his daily news and blog updates at his home and on his BlackBerry, and whatever he reads on his Mac shows up as read on his BlackBerry (and vice versa).