The OP listed RSS readers and aggregators - I've used bloglines in the past and it was nice. These days I prefer to simply include feeds into Google's custom home page, works great and I made that my browser home page so it works on all my browsers the same.
In terms of outbound:
As to my own blog, I don't have one syndicated, but I hacked a custom solution for one of my phpBB formums to integrate blogs into the forum. These days one can do virtually anything they want to integrate blogs into web sites, portals, forums, social network sites and so forth.
I use PHP5 and a few classes from phpclasses.org that work well as well as Simple XML for handling all my needs. These days working with XML and RSS 2.0 is very easy.
-jim