Phil Ringnalda's "Keeping Up with Blogs the Easy Way" is a nice introduction to, for lack of a better phrase, weblog update services. We've been using blo.gs to manage our blogroll for a while [personally and publically; the blogroll on our main page is powered by a modified (see note below) version of Paul Hammond's blo.gs.pl, which, as the name reveals, uses blo.gs to create a list of recently modified sites], and we're trying not to remember the tedious task of visiting each site we read, every day, to see if it has updated.
We strongly recommend taking a look at the services Paul mentions and picking the one best for you.
Note: We're often peeved when webloggers mention that they use a "modified version" of X piece of software, but fail to mention in what way their version has been modified. If it's important enough to mention that the software has been changed, why not tell us how? So: Paul's script will be right for most people "out of the box." Unfortunately, our server lacks the Perl Template module required to run his script, so we decided to instead use HTML::Template. Now you know.