My solution to this problem is a bit more centered on the reader. NewsBlur, as some of you may know, is a feed reader that shows you the original site and marks

My solution to this problem is a bit more centered on the reader. NewsBlur, as some of you may know, is a feed reader that shows you the original site and marks off what you have read as you read it. Since this Google Reader reader would track you as you move between sites (and has a heuristic for determining which story you're hovering over or scrolling past), you would not have the read counts in front of you. My typical feed reading experience is bounce between the few sites that have updated content. I use RSS because it means I don't have to hit the site as frequently, and only when it has new content. If this had a way of both showing the unread counts of all feeds as well as allowing you to read the original site, I think it would be the solution to the problem that RSS readers originally solved. This is just an idea for the service. I developed something very similar, but you can't go to the original site and still get stories marked as read as you read them. But I moved to RSS to get to those counts of all of my feeds in the first place. The loss of context (the site's styling and design) was a big negative to RSS, but the loss of inline counts would be harder to swallow. Keep the left side of Google Reader, but replace the much larger right side. And if anybody is interested, the similar idea that I'm working on is at: http://www.newsblur.com http://www.newsblur.com. My implementation of the solution to the feed reading problem is very, very similar, but those unread counts, man, are the reason I even use RSS. And having to jump between tabs (Google Reader -> Original Site), would separate me from those counts.