With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use?  How efficient are they?  Could they work better?

I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work.  For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader.  I love it.  But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday.  What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds.  This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader.  Cool.

So, my mind is taking that idea one step further.  I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website.  Why?  Well, I comment on the posts.  To do that, I have to be on their site.  So why go through the RSS middleman?  I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all.  I think it has, at least a little.

I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”

1. A-list feeds that I just go to their site, but will also have some subscription to alert me (probably email and/or Twitter),
2. A-list feeds that I really like, but I don’t generally comment on or frequent the site, so I’ll get an email subscription,
3. Other feeds that I like enough to subscribe too, but that I just consume.

Of course, the feeds are always in flux.  If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.

So what’s your way?  Any cool tools you use to make it easier?