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I remember seeing something like this in my logs over a year ago. I would see lines like this in my access log:

66.177.198.139 - Anonymous [04/Apr/2005:03:04:17 -0500] "GET /rdf10_xml HTTP/1.1" 200 5322 "" "Shrook/76p (Distributed; +http://www.fondantfancies.com/shrook/distfaq.php) "

I haven't seen a hit from this in a while, perhaps that effort didn't gain much traction. Who knows if this one will... I never saw Shrook mentioned on Slashdot.

Developers are already producting easy-to-use RSS clients. Firefox already supports it, Safari for Tiger is going to support it, and there are plenty of great newsreaders out there. However, this is still good news because the idea of news aggregation will be put more in the spotlight.

People local to the areas where these newspapers are published at may end up checking out these custom newsreaders, and I can picture a lot of people using the New York Times reader, but mostly I see this just leading to greater adoption of what's already out there. Just about every browser is or already has RSS support. If IE7 doesn't have RSS, it will be another major feature the alternatives support that IE doesn't.

I just don't see readers flocking to the idea of running multiple newsreaders for each paper they want to read. The article mentions some that will read competitors' papers, but I foresee them trying to find ways to stick ads all over the place (probably in the newsreader itself). Like I said, it will just drive adoption of the open, freeware stuff that's ad-free and already here.

As another poster has pointed out, banning users who check too frequently is an excellent fallback. A tiny site won't know to install the software, but it won't be an issue for a tiny site.

NewsFire
NetNewsWire
NewsMac
Pulp Fiction
Shrook

Shrook for Mac OS X appears to do almost that, where a central server collects updates and has ONE randomly-chosen client check for updates as frequently as every five minutes, but all other clients just refer to the central server to see if feeds are updated.

I use Shrook, a lovely RSS reader for MacOS X. It uses distributed checking to get around this problem. From their FAQ:

A central server maintains a database of when each channel was last updated. To keep it up to date, every so often, the server chooses a computer to check for new items and report back. The frequency of this varies from every 5 minutes for popular channels, to every half hour for channels with only one online subscriber, and it tries to use a different computer each time. At the other end, each copy of Shrook checks in with the server every 5 minutes, and if any of its channels are out of date, it reloads them.

Nice. So not only does it stop DDoSing the web server, it means I get updates within five minutes instead of every half hour.

I use Shrook, a lovely RSS reader for MacOS X. It uses distributed checking to get around this problem. From their FAQ:

A central server maintains a database of when each channel was last updated. To keep it up to date, every so often, the server chooses a computer to check for new items and report back. The frequency of this varies from every 5 minutes for popular channels, to every half hour for channels with only one online subscriber, and it tries to use a different computer each time. At the other end, each copy of Shrook checks in with the server every 5 minutes, and if any of its channels are out of date, it reloads them.

Nice. So not only does it stop DDoSing the web server, it means I get updates within five minutes instead of every half hour.

I use Shrook. It's not free, but the reason I chose it over NetNewsWire is that it does distributed checking. You can also run multiple copies on different machines and they'll keep in sync automatically.