I have been thinking about feed reading styles a bit more. I have more time to think because my current feed reader, NewsAlloy, is down for more than 24 hours. NewsAlloy is undergoing a massive database update. It is OK as there are a few pleasant surprises after is back. 
In the mean time I was thinking more about the kind of feeds I read. I thought why not use a different feed reader for each type of feeds I read.
The first kind is my friends blog feeds. I always read my friends’ posts first and I read every one of their posts. So I need a feed reader where I can give more attention to these. Well I give a lot more attention to my mails (maybe because I get very few mails). So I looked for a “feed to mail” converter. I choose RSSFWD for this. So far I like reading my friends’ posts this way. This probably does not scale for a lot of feeds but I got only a few friends who blog. 
The next type of feeds I read are from blogs like ComputerZen.com, Carnage4Life’s Space, Erik’s Linkblog, TechCrunch, Scobleizer… I find most posts in these blogs to my liking and I want to read them all but they can wait till I have free time. I am thinking of using Google Reader for this because Reader shows one post at a time. But the problem is I am not able to find a easy way to get rid of all the feeds from my blogroll I imported to Reader previously. Are there any other online reader that shows one post at a time?
Then there are all the gadget feeds and gaming feeds I read. There are a lot of repetition/reposts in these kind of feeds. For these I think I will stick to NewsAlloy. This provides a newspaper type of view so that I can quickly browse through these posts.
Finally there are a lot of high volume news feeds like Digg, Slashdot, Wired, CNet… I think I will be better off following memetrackers for getting a fix of popular news instead of reading these feeds. Memetrackers like Megite and TailRank provide an option to filter the memes based on a uploaded OPML. I have been giving more attention to these since NewsAlloy was down. I am liking these. I think I will stick with Meglite for a while. Maybe I will check out Findory again for this.
One thing that would be very interesting is that if a single feed aggregator could provide all the above interfaces for reading it would be cool. I think that is what Dare and Torsten are cooking up for the next version of RSS Bandit.
I will experiment with multiple feed readers for a while and see if this improves my feed reading efficiency. Anyway I feel I have more time since NewsAlloy has been down. This tells me how much time I have been spending on feed reading.
Since I had some extra time yesterday I built a small utility “NewsAlloy Notifier” to notify me when NewsAlloy has new feeds with the count. Here is a preview:
Update: Fixed typo. Thanks Matthew for pointing this out.
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#1 by matthew on March 9, 2006 - 3:03 PM
Like to read your blog. There is a typo in this post, Meglite, should be Megite (www.megite.com, not http://www.meglite.com). Thanks.
#2 by sajal on March 9, 2006 - 8:54 PM
have you tried Sage plugin for firefox. you can supply your own .css stylesheets
#3 by Konstantin G. on March 10, 2006 - 1:43 PM
Would be this be of any interest?…
http://aspadvice.com/blogs/kostik/archive/2006/03/10/15702.aspx