Slate (from MSN, but I don't hold that against them) has an article on speed-reading the net, which is all about how RSS works. They even have a collection of popular RSS feeds, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, not to mention the Drudge report. This is an OPML file, which means you can't read in your browser. To use it with the RSS Reader Panel, open up the RSS sidebar, click on Tools, click on OPML Import/Export, and follow the directions. All this is to introduce the launching of Slate's own RSS feed.
While following the links in the OPML file, (specifically, Drudge -- you can look up the link yourself) I found a link to Myway.com, which is a portal that looks the way Yahoo used to look. Clean, no adds, no popups (not that users of Mozilla Firefox have to worry about that). They offer their own webbed based email (of course), but allow you to access any other webmail account with a click or two. Very nice.
Another thing I learned about RSS and the Reader Panel: Many (not all) RSS feeds contain story summaries. Just using the RSS sidebar doesn't show these summaries, but if you click on View => Open in Contents Area and then click on the RSS feed, the summaries will show up in the browser window, with the links still in the lower panel. If tabbed browsing is enabled, doing a middle-button mouse click will open up the summary in a new tab.
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