I second’s @joan’s suggestion to use RSS. There’s a new thing called json feed that is supposed to make this easier for content authors and reeder applications to integrate but it’s the same idea and it remains to be seen if it’s going to reverse the downward trend of RSS.
Most of the time though, people blogging and writing content use a platform that includes a RSS feed by default so it’s often as easy as adding a website to your RSS reader which will automatically find the feed URL and include it. I use RSS for all “news/content” and I just have a bunch of categories so that I can ignore some things when I’m not in the mood for them. Sometimes I send articles to Instapaper when it’s longer reads that I might want to read when I’m offline. I’ll also “star” my favorites when I read something I’ll likely want to refer to later.
One thing with RSS though is that you have to actively seek out new sources. Some might find the fact that new sources/ideas aren’t as easily discoverable to be a problem but since we tend to be more receptive to new ideas when we’re ready for them, I think it might work out okay in practice to require some effort on our part to seek out new sources.
