I think that I'm going to try out a self hosted solution for a while. For no other reason than just the fact that it seems fun. Here's one that was posted to HN recently:
Impressive. Sad to know that many promising projects fly under the radar. The Changelog featured Stringer and that probably helped putting it over 1000 Favorites, but this project easily comes out on top, yet isn't well known.
I switched to feedly. I'm not thrilled (it seems to really stress my machine out) but it's not terrible. I remain curious how it well it will work after Google shuts Reader down.
I may go the self-hosting route too. I wrote a script to pull down all of the entries of every feed I'm subscribed to in Reader - the OPML of subscriptions is helpful, but for blogs that are offline I want to have a copy of the feed from Google's cache.
I'm not doing anything with the data right now, but I figure I've got it if I want to do something with it later.
If what you want is the ability to skim large #s of headlines, organize lots of feeds, label them, tag articles for later reading in one fast unobtrusive "no magazine layout" reader, SwarmIQ is your choice.
Sign up at http://www.swarmiq.com/register/GOOGLEREADERISDEAD , click on the Google reader icon to get all your feeds, and get up and running straight away.
Disclosure: I'm on the team that built this site :-) Also, we don't have "Google Alerts" type functionality yet.
All I want is a list of new things and a place in the title bar for each one that'll open the actual article. I don't want a replacement which makes it basically impossible to visit the site that updated (The Old Reader) and I don't want to find a mystery-meat icon among about a dozen bloody share-this-on-friendfacetwat buttons (Feedly).
So none of the alternatives are working for me. And I'll never get blo.gs back because it fell down the Yahoo hole years ago along with all my Delicious data.
Seconding this, NewsBlur has for me been everything good about Google Reader, and more. You can reshare blog posts on your own "blog" to even non-Newsblur users, which is a really cool feature. It's pretty much its own social network based around blog post sharing. Totally into it.
Tiny Tiny RSS (tt-rss, http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki). I've loved it since I've installed it, and that's even without the iPhone integration enabled. I'm sure I'll love it more once I have that. I deleted the 'reader.google.com' from my Chrome auto complete, and replaced it with 'reader.mydomain.com' so my experience is maintained. :)
iPhone integration? (a quick look at the site finds me nothing - and I'd previously dicarded TTRSS coz I needed something that synced across a couple of platforms.)
https://github.com/swanson/stringer