The author of this blog item (RSS Behind the Firewall - Jeremy Zawodny) makes a good point about a loosely-coupled model - using RSS to stay abreast of information at home and at work. Now I need to have two aggregators: one at home and one at work...
The trouble that I perceive he's raising is that with two separate aggregators, it's essentially doubling the setup, configuration, and most importantly, each aggregator is not going to know what the other aggregator is doing. Items that you read at work [of course] show up at home as unread items. This is indeed a thorny issue because synchronizing anything is fundamentally a bad idea. Although I love my client-side news aggregators, this issue points out how important servers are to knowledge systems that help you manage content, regardless of your geographic location or the computing device you happen to be using. As devices become more connected, this issue will grow in complexity - already I suffer from this problem on two desktops, an iPaq, and a notebook. One observation - NewsGator achieves this if (and only if) you use Outlook for e-mail and a Microsoft Exchange folder for persisting incomming news. As you roam from system to system, the Exchange folder is always updated. What's the more pervasive answer? - I'm not sure, but I suspect it has something to do with a meta-data integration platform. ;-) | 
