Sense shifting - hearablog and Feedspeak

A few years back we got excited about "time-shifting" - PVR's like Topfield and Tivo taught us that it was OK to watch the news at 8:17pm instead of the 7pm that had been dictated to us for decades.



Same goes for blogs - we've been slaves to RSS feeds since 2003 without too many cool filtering mechanisms (Yahoo Pipes or Google Alerts anyone?). In the last 2 years RSS is proclaimed dead and Twitter is the new heir but the social filtering (ahem) is a complete fail.

So being a good slave, I know I need to carve off whole sections of my life to keep up with RSS feeds and my friend has been gReader on Android by the almost palindromic "Noin Nion". But I'm failing: sites like Techcrunch have ramped up to ludicrous volumes of articles to justify AOLs purchase and so "Mark as Read" is the my new new (and oldest old) friend.

HOWEVER - Whilst not a new idea, I've been experimenting the last week with Medium shifting (or Sense shifting). Typically in the car or when walking or working in the yard I use my surplus audio sense to consume podcasts - whats cute about Hear A Blog is they have pretty good narrations of Suster, Shirky, Ariely - all the guys you want to read but can't get to because of Team Arrington's textual diarrhea...

So Hear a Blog is pretty nice - but its only a few top 20 geek blogs. So for more edgy stuff I'm using Feedspeak Pro on Android - it cost me $1 and uses the TTS (Text to Speech) built into the phone. Its almost but not quite as annoying as the TTS on my old Amiga - but I will stick with this "sense shifting" app for a while and give my eyes a rest. Next step is to aggressively filter Techcrunch - how about "grep -vi lacy" ?

Any other suggestions for filtering Techcrunch down to: segment, interesting people and serendipity?
I can't believe this is still an unsolved problem.