If you read blogs, you need an RSS/blog reader. It’s so much easier to use a blog reader than to bookmark all your favorite sites and visit them because you only get notified when they update their content, saving the step of visiting a site and wondering “Did they update today or not?”
My favorite blog reader used to be Bloglines, but then the site was too slow to load and I started using Google Reader, and now here I am with Google Reader.
I read a lot of blogs. 1004 blogs to be exact. I don’t know that number by heart, but I know that number because Google Reader tells me so. The stuff I love, I shared publicly. You can check it out at http://philgerb.com or by clicking in on any of my articles and looking in the right sidebar at the widget that says “Google Reader Shared Items.”
I love Google Reader for many reasons, and I thought I’d share several of the best reasons with you now.
Google Reader’s shared items (for you) – I can share items with all the folks who want to follow me, saving you the time of reading through 1004 blogs yourself.
Google Reader’s shared items (for me) – I enjoy reading things people I respect read. I can do this easily by “following” these people and enjoying their shared items. I like this feature so much, this is where I start my blog reading every day, in my friends’ shared items.
Create Topical Folders – Google Reader allows me to easily create topical folders for the various things I read about. Customer service, social media, management, marketing and the like, all have their own topical folder. Sure, some authors go off-topic from time to time, but I categorize them in the most appropriate folder for the bulk of their writing.
Add tags to individual articles - I can also tag individual articles by topic, so when I share them with my followers (and when I refer back to them later on for research), they are nicely categorized.
Separate website for my shared items – If I haven’t convinced you to use Google Reader yet, or if I don’t want to share my Google e-mail address with you, you can still check out all my shared items on a specific URL. The real URL is https://www.google.com/reader/shared/philgerb but I have pointed http://philgerb.com to it so when I share it during my presentations, it’s much easier for folks to remember. This website also links to my Google profile, so for those who don’t know, they think I built another website 
Mark All as Read (by a certain period of time) – Sometimes I just get too darn many articles to read in my backlog, so I want to mark them all as read and start over. But now, if I use the drop down (see below), I can pick the period of time I want to mark them as read, especially helpful if I am on vacation or traveling for an extended period of time.
So those are some of the reasons I love Google Reader. Now it’s your turn.
Do you use Google Reader? What’s do you love (or hate) about it? Do you have a different RSS/blog reader that you’d like to share?
Let us know in the comments below, and thanks for playing!
Love photo credit to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chitrasudar/2752476205/
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