One of my connections on LinkedIn asked how to share things from Google Reader on LinkedIn using the LinkedIn Answers feature. It’s one of my favorite features of LinkedIn, as instead of searching for an answer through Google, for what may or may be the right answer, you can ask the smart people you’re connected to and they can help you.

Here are the step by step instructions for adding this button:

In Google Reader:

Go to:

Settings
Reader Settings
Send To

Click on: Create a Custom Link

In the Name field, type in: LinkedIn
In the URL field, copy and paste the exact URL that follows: http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=${url}&title=${title}
In the Icon field, copy and paste: http://www.linkedin.com/favicon.ico

If you’re more of a visual learner, there’s a video below you can watch. I watched it, and it helped, but the URL mentioned goes to the creator’s LinkedIn profile, not to somewhere you can copy and paste the code. The rest of the steps work great.

Your turn: Do you have a question about social media I, or someone in my network, can answer? Leave a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn and ask it there.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kandyjaxx/2011604579/in/photostream/

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/