I moved noisy feeds out of Google Reader and into FriendFeed. I use the FriendFeed notifier http://friendfeed.com/about/notifier to have items popup on my screen in real-time. If you follow a few key people & feeds on FriendFeed, all the interesting news should reach you.

It's mostly invasive, and now I don't have to constantly check anything and I don't feel like I'm missing anything either. If it's important it will probably popup more than once. In fact, it's how I noticed this post http://friendfeed.com/newsyc