I've written about RSS (news feed) aggregators in the past, but over the past 6 months it really has taken off and almost any site you'd want to keep up with is now available via an RSS feed.
So you can stop "checking" to see if a site you like that's only updated occasionally has been updated, and start using an RSS aggregation service like NewsGator to manage almost all of your web reading. I have about 80 sites that I track via NewsGator and it's a great way to keep up on friends who have weblogs, as well as photographers with RSS-enabled photoblogs (or even just Flickr pages, since that's RSS-enabled.)
I've included an abridged version of the current list of web sites I have linked into my (free) NewsGator online account, so you can see how powerful this can be. I'm able to read updates from all of them -- and keep track of exactly which I've read -- all from a single interface.
