[jokermatt999]

> What matters is how important and relevant each feed is to you at the current time. Put the ones I'm most likely to read at the top.

Google Reader's "Sort by magic" attempts to do this. It'd be nice to have more information on how it works though.

Also, don't underestimate the power of tagging your RSS feeds. Just like people set up GMail/Outlook/etc labels for important people or emails, you can set up tags for important feeds that you don't want to miss. Why not tag all of the "must read" feeds, the "skim" feeds, and the "eh" feeds, so that you can click on the "eh" label, and mark all as read if you get behind?

Google Reader is already a pretty powerful tool for feed reading (especially in conjunction with Yahoo Pipes or similar), and a lot of issues with RSS can already be solved with the tools at hand.

[mattlanger]

Tagging! If only! That's one of the features I've long wanted, a one-to-many relationship between feeds and categories, as opposed to the inverse we get with folders. What if I want to categorize something as "must read" in addition to "technology"? What you describe here is a useful trick, but it means I'm stuck labeling my feeds in a manner directly related to my need to be able to mark-as-read.

[jokermatt999]

Ahh, I forgot that tagging is item by item, but feeds are folder by folder only. My apologies. I'll go make a feature request for it. It seems odd that they wouldn't already have this.

[bdarnell]

Google Reader's folders do allow for tag-like multiple categorization. If you use drag and drop then it acts like folders (and removes the feed from its previous location), but if you use the "Feed settings" dropdown in the blue bar you can check multiple folders and the feed will appear in all of them.

You can also turn off display of unread counts with the menu under the little downward triangle in the left column. These features are pretty undiscoverable, but they're there.

[Lewisham]

I thought "Sort by Magic" was simply a means of floating posts from low-volume blogs to the top, so they don't get lost under a sea of Gawker.