Just wanted to put in a good word for Particls, a brilliant free, open standards based app I discovered recently that instantly tracks your favorite sites and topics. It’s kind of like a filtered feed reader.

It’s very easy to set up. Install it, enter a few keywords to indicate your fields of interest and you’re ready to start.

I fed it with some music related words - favorite artists, music industry references such as ASCAP, BMI, DRM, record companies etc., eMusic, iTunes and so on - and I’ve been spending the entire evening reading interesting, highly relevant articles from a seemingly endless array of sources.

In addition you can add your regular rss feeds, and perform a number of tweaks to improve your news stream. But I’m thoroughly impressed with its performance even though I haven’t tweaked it at all.

You can sort your news stream by date or by relevancy. I immediately fell in love with the relevancy sorting option. In the future, I’ll probably use Particls for keyword searches, sorted by relevancy - and continue using Google Reader for my regular feeds, sorted by date.

Highly recommended!