Following up on some events that happened during my hiatus, I decided to start kicking the tires on the new version of Google Reader. I'm sort of digging it. Being absolutely stuck in the "River of News" format would drive me up a wall, but the ability to collect subscriptions using tags still means I can prioritize bundles of new items. If item marking and saving is markedly better than Bloglines, I'll probably switch over, especially if a Google Reader API ever materializes. I, and a fair number of other folks, use our aggregators as information foraging tools as well as news readers.
Weird. Take two months off, subscribers go up, according to Bloglines.