Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

If you need to know the news as it happens (like when Britney hits yet another car) use Mesa Dynamics Tickershock , a ticker banner that displays headlines from your RSS feeds.

You can have Tickershock on all the time as a banner below your menu bar or at the bottom of your screen. See an interesting headline? Click it, and a separate window opens to display the RSS summary of that story; click the link in the window, and you’ll go to the full story on the Web.

Tickershock has six different banner styles, and you can adjust the opacity of the banner, the colors, font, how headlines are displayed, and more.