I look at it this way…

My paper boy delivers my newspaper every day. If I go away for a week, I might read the latest one upon return. But I don’t feel compelled to go through them all and read every article. Old news is not news I want.

So if you use the newsreader to read ‘news’ I’d apply the same principle and use option (c).

However, if you use RSS as notifications of things you don’t want to miss, then I’d use option (a).

Best strategy I think is to separate ‘news’ feeds from ‘notification’ feeds. Use separate folders in google reader for each type, and assign the feeds to the folders accordingly. Then it’s easy to look at all your notifications and just scan the news if you are so inclined.

Sounds like the high volume feeds like Digg, Engadget, and Gizmodo should be in the news folder and you low volume blogs should be in notifications folder.

To put it another way, RSS is not email.

Hope it helps.

Cheers,
Tim

To get a nice sense of progress, I usually start with the feed that has the most unread items and go from there. Really makes your unread count go down very quickly.

Good luck, in any case!