1. Daily Reads
2. Weekly Reads
3. Occasional Reads
4. Probation

Feeds that stay in that last folder too long without getting read should be trashed, and the rest of the feeds should be moved around until you’re comfortable with the flow of things. This might not work for everyone, but it’s worth trying if you’re desperate for a Google Reader makeover.

(This is self-promotion-y, but intended to help, so hopefully that’s okay.)

We have a Firefox plugin for Google Reader that works with all your existing feeds, and enables you to filter them to whatever volume level you like: http://gr.aiderss.com/

The technology behind it is PostRank, which analyzes audience engagement with posts and assigns a score. Audience engagement consists of various metrics for how people read, interact with, organize, and share posts — comments, delicious bookmarks, tweets, etc. (http://www.postrank.com/postrank/).

There’s a drop-down field that enables you to select a filtering level, from “All” to “Best”. Or, if you prefer filtering numerically, you can press Ctrl and Z and change it to a text box and filter by “7″, for example (which will then display all the posts in a feed that have scored a PostRank of 7 or above.

A broader solution outside of Google Reader or Firefox is our website (http://postrank.com), where you can analyze feeds and filter subscriptions by PostRank score or topic keywords (so if you wanted to subscribe to Unclutterer, but only get posts about “office” uncluttering, for example). You can then export those filtered feeds to any reader of your choice.

(More on those options here: http://blog.postrank.com/getting-started/)

Or, if you’re looking for pre-vetted content, we’ve added PostRank Discovery, which enables you to discover, share, and add feeds according to specific topic areas (so you can create a reading list of tips ‘n’ tricks sites, for example, and share it, or discover someone else’s).

You can also request topics be added to the PostRank NewsRoom (http://postrank.com/twitter), which tweets great articles by topic to followers of that topic.

Hope that helps!

That is, I’ll go down the list of new arrivals and mark read anything that’s not interesting at all, read or bring up in a new tab anything that might be worth reading, and ignoring the items I plainly don’t have time to read at the moment but I might want to read later.

Once every day or more I’ll pull up a few things from the most and least recent ends of the list to read, but I don’t set any artificial limits on it as my (limited) attention span makes that unnecessary. =^)

So it’s a revolving queue of about 500&ldash;600 items and I feel it takes up a comfortably-sized amount of my time and attention.

Check out: http://my.alltop.com — allows you to set up a webpage of your favorite feeds, displays the titles of the last 5 posts, and hover provides a summary of each post. And, there’s no ‘unread’ number

Disclosure: I am the Chief Evangelist of Alltop

Here’s another tip to help you at least feel less stressed about your constantly rising unread counts – HIDE IT!

On the left hand panel, next to Subscriptions, click the little arrow key for a drop down menu, and you can select Show Unread Counts, or Hide Unread Counts. Hide them – the subs will still show in bold but you won’t have that big looming ‘67′ nagging you that you have all this work to do to get through 67 posts.

You can do the same up at the top in the section that shows All Items.

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Also, this has been said before, but it’s liberating to just select All Items, and Mark All As Read. Done. Just think, before you had all this content streaming into Google Reader, you got along just fine without reading every post on every blog about every subject you’re interested in! You’ll feel that little twinge of “OMG, what if I missed something important!”. For like 5 seconds. And then relief. Move on with your day.

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I also find myself often clicking Mark All Read on blogs that I used to read more voraciously. If that’s the case, I just remove the subscription. I can always pop in on the site from time to time, the old-fashioned way (by, you know, actually visiting the site) if I need a fix. This works especially well when I have a few blogs with mostly duplicate content.

I also use categories, but I do it a bit differently. I have a couple of categories that have either a LOT of information (regular news feeds from newspapers and such) or a lot of redundant information (four football news feeds, for instance; nearly every story will be on a minimum of three of them). If I go a couple days without checking Reader, I start with these categories because I can cut through hundreds of headlines in just a couple minutes. The number of unread stories remaining in my other feeds is usually pretty manageable at that point.

There is also a great add-in called Morning Coffee. You add websites to it (choosing every day, M-F, weekends, an individual day, …). When you click on its coffee cup icon, it opens your sites for that day in tabs. Great for occasionally updating sites.

I like these because it lets me choose when I am accessing something, rather than drinking from the firehose in the reader. (which still has a fair amount of stuff in it.)