When it comes to reading feeds I have a habit of falling behind, I always have like 150-200 unread items. Until now I’ve been using a task bar application called Reader Notifier that shows me all updates from my Google Reader, or actually only updates from the specific tag I want it to show (blogs). When I’m checking the feeds I’m not really looking for anything in particular, I’m just looking for an interesting read, and seeing that I have 200 unread items just isn’t fun at all. So instead of this I’m now trying out Snackr, a neat desktop ticker that shows random items from your subscriptions.
You can set how long you want unread items to show, I’m currently using the default at 30 days, but I will change that to 1 or maybe 2 weeks. You can also set the speed of the ticker and where you want to have it (top, bottom, left, right). I’m using it at the second slowest speed and at the bottom as I find that to be the least distracting way of using it. Of course if you need to focus on something else, you can collapse it with just a click.
When I’m using Firefox, which I always do, it’s neatly positioned above the ticker like this:
I can’t say for sure that I’ll continue to use this, but I think I will. I think you should check it out, it’s definitely worth a try! Oh and it’s an Adobe AIR application so it works for you Windowsers out there too 
Enjoy!
EDIT:
Actually having it like this turned out to be much better 
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Hmm, interesting app, but with the amount of articles I go though on a daily basis, it would just die :p Plus the way I have all my feeds already organized in Safari, it would be a huge pain to port them to anything else. I think I’ll make a post about how I digest all my RSS feeds today :p