Ask HN: Better alternative to daily RSS feeds reading?

Every day a few articles interesting to me are being published on the web. What technology do you use to discover them, while filtering out the rest?

I've been using Google Reader for a long time, and while theoretically it should save time by eliminating the need to visit each website individually, I noticed that opposite is sometimes true. The main issues I am struggling with are:

- with more feeds added to the reader, the noise is increased

- the very act of being subscribed to something can create a feeling of "obligation" to check and "clear" the feed.

- the technology fosters the attachment of "checking what's new," in a similar way email does, and that wastes even more time.

Of course, all of those issues can be alleviated by proper feeds curating, unsubscribe mercilessly and insist on discipline to not check the feeds too often.

Anyway, I feel there is a time to discover/invent some new technology to deliver my daily reading to me, something which would avoid the need to subscribe to sources. Recently, for example, I discovered that when something truly interesting is published, it will usually appear on twitter, and also being retweeted several times. I've been quite successful to use twitter search to discover new stuff for the keywords I am interested about, and the services like Tweetmeme are promising, too. But I didn't found yet some service which I can truly replace Google Reader with. Maybe that's also a good startup idea. What's your experience?