+Mark van Walraven To strip cruft (ads, widgets, and other distractions) off of blog articles and general web pages for a cleaner and easier reading/concentrating experience, you might consider using Readability, which has a handy bookmarklet that you can put in your browser toolbar for quick and easy use: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets. If you're an avid Evernote user, they have a product called Clearly that's pretty good as well: https://evernote.com/clearly/. Similarly Pocket and Instapaper have this type of functionality (with bookmarklets as well), though they typically require one to save articles to one's account first prior to reading, though this is rather handy when skimming through G+, Twitter, and Facebook feeds for interesting material one wants to read later.

+John Baez For RSS, the heir apparent to Google Reader's old product is Feedly (http://feedly.com/). There are certainly a small handful of others, but I suspect most would say that Feedly is the clear winner. They use a freemium model in which they give the majority of their useful functionality away for free and charge a small and reasonably modest subscription fee for a set of advanced functionality that most probably don't need or use. If you want to add a simple Feedly button to your blog siderail (via widget), you can find details and instructions here: http://feedly.com/factory.html

In a past life and as a side hobby, I spent several years running and building a large portion of social media for Johns Hopkins, so I've played with nearly every platform in existence. I've been pecking away for a while at blog post describing how researchers and academics can best use blogging and social media presence to improve their work & speed up their workflow - a topic that could actually be a reasonable sized book. Some of the commentary here has motivated me to get back to it presently.