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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I use Google Reader too, Phil, and I do love it. Thanks for this posting because I haven’t been using it as fully as I could.
Terry
Ditto to everything above Phil!
I love Google Reader, too. And, it’s even better with the Firefox plug-in called “Read it Later,” I can read items later, even when I’m off-line (i.e., on bus or train, etc. if I have no network access). Cool.
I agree with you Phil, Google Reader is the most important tool for me in terms of reading / following news. I still don’t get people that are moving to Twitter to read their feed instead of Google, doesn’t make sense to me.
And good shares, by the way… visited your shared page several times.
I <3 Google Reader!
Hi Phil – you are so clever .. I’m just starting to use it .. and so I’ll take your tips before I go further and save my energies in the learning process: anything to save time.
1004 – well my abilities will improve somewhat .. just getting above 20!
So – thank you – I shall enjoy the learning curve ..
all the best – Hilary Melton-Butcher
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HiPhil – again! – I have been subscribing .. so am now going to be using Google Reader. A question: how do you comment to the various posts, or blogs you wish to comment on?
Can you just explain the Shared Reader part in a bit more detail .. I’ve joined your Shared Reader .. and will think about others .. how does it work, differently to the Google Reader .. perhaps I’m being thick, quite possible – lots going on here – thanks for extra info etc ..
Hilary
I have been looking at Google Reader, but was not aware of the functionality of it. This sounds like it will be very cool!