I have been traveling and using various applications on my laptop [MacBookPro], my iPad and my iPhone and have some thoughts on good news aggregators.  My usual process is at the end/beginning of each day I review the unread items in these aggregators for up to date news and information.  I have several just for fun [Cozy Mystery blog is one example], but most are sites or blogs regarding interests of mine [news, politics, current events, photography, computers and Macs, etc.].  So, my thoughts:

I moved to Google Reader about a year ago and it's a good choice for a basic news aggregator, particularly since many of my other apps coordinate with it.

On the laptop or desktop, I access Google Reader either through its browser space or else through using Reeder [particularly on the laptop].  It integrates quite well with many/most of the other services I use [Instapaper, Evernote, etc.] and has a good interface.

On the iPad and iPhone, I use Feedler which I like much better than Reeder = both of these apps sync and pull in the Google Reader feeds and so the GR aggregator serves as the master and the others are chosen for their device usage and work with GR just fine.

When I review items in Reader/Reeder/Feedler and like them, I star them for future review, send to Instapaper, send to Evernote, share on Twitter or other places using BufferApp.  If I find something of general interest or worth passing on, I usually send it via Bufferapp to Twitter or put it in StumbleUpon.

I am in this turn of the year hoping to get myself more organized [having said that over many years!] and hope to improve on the above described process, but this is what I'm doing now.  Hope this is of some help.

[all bolded items can easily be found in a search via Google or whatever]

ON DESIGN ARTISTRY: When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

via thenetworkgarden.blogs.com

This is a quote from Steve Jobs in a blog comment by Mark Sigal - the whole blog post is excellent but I thought this was apropos of my own goal in my work and photography.

We returned late Tuesday night, uneventfully, and on waking up and reading the morning paper I felt a bit confused.  Reading the stories in the Des Moines Register I noted that I had already heard all this information before!   Evidently, by going online with my iPhone to read my RSS feeds at the various airports through the day, I was able to keep up with current information constantly so that I knew all the news reported in the newspaper the next morning, albeit not in as much detail.  That's not a slam at the paper, just a recognition that one can keep up to date on a number of topics and then look to newspapers and online journals for more indepth coverage and information.