I haven’t been a big fan of RSS in the past, but I find myself using it more and more nowadays, due to exactly one new development: Google Reader.
It solves the two major problems I had before: 1) missing articles because of feeds with a small history, since Google does the aggregation frequently and keeps a longer list of articles, and 2) it remains synchronized when used from multiple locations, not tying it to a particular program install on a specific machine, so I can use it from home, work, and while traveling without any redundancy.
Edit: Though to be fair, Google probably wasn’t really the first, as there have been other web-based aggregators. Google’s interface and integration into the rest of your account certainly makes it a lot easier to use, though.