We’ve all heard the phrase “Knowledge is Power” a billion times throughout our lives. The more you know, the more successful you’ll be in life. But it was getting the right knowledge from the right places that was tough. Well, this is 2009, and millions of blogs and social media tools are giving us more knowledge than we can possibly handle. How can you harness all that into a format that’s easy to read and actually digest? One great solution is Google Reader.
Google Reader is an aggregator that reads new content feeds (called RSS feeds) from many different blogs and websites, then presents them to you in one location for fast reading. For example, if you follow CNN, USA Today, ESPN and this blog, you no longer have to go to each individual site to see the newest content. Just go to Google Reader and all the newest articles or blog postings are there for your reading pleasure. Now imagine you’re following 30 different sites and the benefits of using the tool become even more apparent. It has the simplicity of a newspaper with the information capacity of the web.
RSS readers have been around for years and are nothing new to blogging and web veterans out there; however, a significant number of co-workers and friends that I talk to are completely new to this type of information gathering. And many of them get excited once they go through the easy set up and start using it. Here’s why they get excited:
- No more email newsletters piling up in the inbox (and the spam that may follow it)
- Unsubscribe and resubscribe to the feeds without the usual headaches of getting removed from email lists
- Tremendous time savings – how long would it take you to individually go to 20 popular blogs and review a week’s worth of content?
- Easy sharing and saving capabilities – scan through and star items that you want to save for later.
How to get started? First, watch this two-minute video on Google Reader. Then you can subscribe to my blog to get started (you can unsubscribe right away if you want; I won’t know!). Click that blue button on the right side of this page next to the word “RSS”. That button is a common way of representing an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, and is often orange or blue in color. Look for it on just about any blog or website to quickly add items to your reader. After you click the button, find the +Google button, then go to Add to Google Reader. Now you’ll have to sign up for a Google account or sign in to an existing one. Once you do this, you will see the main Google Reader page with “Mostly Matt” listed on the left side under Subscriptions. The number of unread posts is listed in bold.
Now try manually adding a feed. Go up to Add a Subscription and type in a website you like. If you type in espn.com, for example, you will quickly see all the latest sports news from ESPN and be automatically subscribed to their feed. Cool, huh?
I will post some more advanced tips for using Google Reader in future posts, but hopefully this will give you a good start. I’m interested to hear what you think about this tool. Have you used it before? Are there other tools that do it better? Let me know in the comments section.
