Now that nine out of every ten people keep a personal blog, it’s hard to keep up. Then there are all the company blogs (like this one!), the food review blogs, the metro blogs, and the if-you-can-spell-it-you-can-blog-about-it blogs. And that’s all on top of whatever regular news feeds you might try to keep up with.

Fortunately, there are some great tools out there to help weed through all that content. I figured I’d share a couple of my favorites, and my hope is that those of you with different favorites might share them in the comments section.

Google Reader

What did I ever do before Google Reader? I have no idea, but I imagine I did somewhat less online reading and my productivity level was also somewhat higher.

If you’ve ever used a stand-alone RSS reader application, that’s just what Reader is, except it’s online. As new stories get posted to the sites that you subscribe to, they’re highlighted as new, unread items. So, provided you keep your Reader page open throughout the day, as I do, you’ll see new stories populate as soon as they’re posted on CNN; or, better yet, new LOLcats the moment they’re published. And the fact that your settings are saved online means you can pick up where you left off from a different location, without having to go back through already-read postings, or surf to different sites.

Google Notebook

Want to hang on to snippets of stories you’ve read, photos you found intriguing, URLs you want to remember at least for a short time without having to create a new bookmark or jot something down on a slip of paper that will only get lost? Google Notebook is great for this — while I’ve noticed a few, um, quirks (it’s still in beta), my notebook lives in the bottom right corner of my browser window, always at the ready. I can store clippings in different categories, so if I’m brainstorming for a new creative project, for example, I can keep inspiration pieces separate from items that might simply be for personal amusement, or for a different project. And, again, thanks to Google, it’s all online so I can access it from anywhere.

Netvibes

In this case, I depart from the Google world to another of my favorites — Netvibes acts as a personalized home page to which you can add different “widgets” like RSS readers, weather maps, and so on — much like iGoogle, but in my opinion, better, if only because I feel like I can fit a lot more information on a page because the cartoonishness of iGoogle takes up a lot more real estate.

One of my favorite uses of Netvibes is for the storage of my bookmarks so that, again, I can access them from anywhere. But what I like most about Netvibes bookmarks is that you can categorize them by “tags” and each bookmark can have more than one tag. So, a blog about food can not only be filed under “blogs” but also under “food” and maybe under “Portland or “National,” for example; you can make up new tags as you go.

StumbleUpon

Finally, in case you didn’t have enough web content to peruse in whatever tools you use to peruse it, it can’t hurt to have an easy way to explore the parts of the web you haven’t found yet. Enter StumbleUpon, a Firefox browser add-in that adds a “Stumble!” button to your browser toolbar. You will be randomly transported to pages that have been submitted by other StumbleUpon users. Where you Stumble to will be determined by a set of interests and preferences that you choose when you first start stumbling. Therefore, you will land on something that, in theory, will be of interest to you, and, once there, you will be able to rate that result, thus further influencing future results.

I’ve certainly landed on some oddball picks, but others are now a part of my ever-expanding Google Reader subscriptions. Which reminds me, I’d better go see what reading I’ve fallen behind on while I was writing this post…