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I have been a regular user of Google Reader, and I was quite disappointed when I got to know about it's impending shutdown. Google Reader has been my information dashboard consisting of science and technology blogs for a long time.  I am sure, like me, many information professionals and scientists have benefited from regular commentaries of analysts via blogs. Now, I have to look for an alternative which will be equally cool or better and free. So far I haven't found a good one and I take this as an opportunity to share my thoughts on building a RSS reader which can serve the scholarly community. 
New age reference managers [1] are not only meant for managing and searching research articles, but also enable active collaboration and sharing. Keeping this in mind it may be worth exploring the possibility of integrating a RSS reader in a reference management software which is accessible via multiple devices easily. This feature will enable the researchers to stay in touch with latest research through journal articles and also through opinions expressed in many science and technology blogs by individuals and journals.  Blog posts on journal articles may be linked to corresponding articles in reference managers and this could be an interesting route to post peer review. Mention of an article in a blog is also a useful research impact metric. A blog recommendation feature may be incorporated so that other researchers can be suggested relevant blogs. Features like tagging, sharing, sorting and topic wise feed categorization can be useful. 

I think RSS readers could add a great deal of stickiness to existing reference management softwares. Of course response to the void, to be created by closing down of Google Reader, has to be quick as many scholars are looking for an alternative and many of them are likely to migrate to different RSS readers soon.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software