Lately I’ve been quite busy at work, on top of that I’m always trying to keep abreast of newest tools, methods, and info (as it pertains to my job). That means I troll through email and net marketing blogs, product sites, and market research briefs. I’ve adopted a few tools that really help with that. Today I’ll talk about a tool that you have most likely heard about, but that I find quite useful, it is Google Reader.
This is a great tool, it manages your feeds for you. Any site worth reading these days has an RSS feed. Once you have an account with google reader you can install a few bookmarks that contain javascript, using these, you can easily subscribe to any site just by clicking the bookmark when
you are on that page. This has been so helpful. Whenever I am reading through sites and happen upon a new blog that has an intriguing entry I just click the subscribe link in my toolbar, google reader pops up, I click subscribe, select a folder, and I’m done.
Once you have your feeds in reader it does all the work for you of pulling in the feeds. It has a very intuitive interface that allows you to quickly move through all the latest posts of all of your feeds. You can either view them as one big list, or go one feed at a time. Another great feature it has is the ability to star items, just as you can in gmail, making it easy to find interesting items that you want to read in full later. You can also click the share link and google will
add this entry to your own reader public feed. People can access this feed via a public link, or a little snippit that you can insert into your own blog. Very neat.
The reader is, of course, still in beta, like most of google’s tools, and it’s not perfect yet. One main area, which is somewhat surprising is that is lacking a search capability. I found this surprising. I currently make good use of google’s blogsearch tool, but I’d like to limit it to the resources that I have in my reader, since I know I can trust them. Other short comings are mostly limited to interface design. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t handle scrolling properly, which I believe is a limitation due to it’s reliance on advanced AJAX and CSS. Hopefully that will get better over time.
You can check out the Public Page that I’ve created via Goolge Reader if you’d like. I’ll have to admit that I don’t share as many articles as I should, some time I forget about that little link.