It used to be that if I followed a /. link to an article on a blog that I enjoyed, I'd immediately subscribe to their RSS feed. I'd made a collection of a few hundred blogs related to computer science alone this way.
At the time I was on a mac, and NetNewsWire was THE RSS reader of choice (backed by Google Reader for syncing feed info) and every morning I'd click on the folder which housed those 100s of blogs, and would probably find 10-20 posts, skim through them in minutes, only reading those that seemed interesting to me in depth. NNN also made it extremely easy to open the post on the original website in a background tab, so I'd keep opening them in the background if I wanted to read it, and then just go through all the background tabs.
It was an amazingly efficient system of following hundreds of independent blogs that were offering uncurated first person information.
I haven't found anything today that comes close to recreating that system, and I can't imagine even finding the kinds of articles I did through this process (an example...I had an HP MediaSmart server, and one day someone randomly posted a How to on replacing the CPU on it with a newer CPU...it was an easy process that cost me about $7 to buy the compatible faster chip on eBay, and a couple of dollars for the heatsink gel). And lo and behold, a week later, everything was running so much better.
Changing the CPU on the Mediasmart server was something I wouldn't even have considered searching for, and even if I did, I'm not sure Google would have turned up anything useful.