RSS has always seemed like a good idea for staying on top of blogs and news sites, particularly ones that don’t have new content every day. The trouble is that I’ve never found an RSS reader that I particularly like. Either they don’t display the content well or they don’t keep track of what you’ve already read or they fail in some other manner.
I’ve been trying Google’s RSS reader, which has the obvious name of Google Reader and the obvious URL of http://www.google.com/reader and I’m quite happy with it. For starters it’s a web-based application, which means (among other things) that I can use it from any of the many computers and operating systems I have on hand. More importantly, it does what I want it to do and it has yet to display any really annoying traits. It’s free, too, although you need a Gmail account to use it (which is also free).
Google Reader is great, makes having a lot of feeds really easy to manage. I use the Reader widget for my iGoogle homepage, handiest way to browse and stay on top of feed updates.
I have the “next new article” link set up as a shortcut in my browser bar, so I can just click through the 30 or so sites I subscribe to.
I’m also using it as my only RSS reader. The search in feeds is great too (i.e. you can filter feed posts by doing a negative search like “-youtube” if you don’t want to see video posts etc.)