What is Google Reader

Something I use to save me time is Google Reader. It aggregates your favorite information from the web in one place. If you have web sites that you tend to go to for information (like 815iMedia.com), use Google reader to automatically update the information for you in one place.

What is Google Reader and RSS Feeds

Google reader uses RSS feeds. RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and

Common RSS Feed Icon

video—in a standardized format. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

You can certainly use any of another dozen readers out there but I tend to stay with the Google family of products. It’s not because I have fallen in loved with Google but because Google has a such a wide amount of tools for content providers and consumers. Best of all is that they are integrated. One userid and password gets you into all the tools.

I think Google reader is an excellent compliment to Google alerts. You may find through google alerts that someone is blogging about you or your company. You may want to follow them. I personally follow several blogs and subscribe to the blogs via Google reader. You get a very quick view of the posts and from that you can decide if you want to read the whole article. Overall I read about 10-25 percent of the posts I get through my reader but its much easier than trying to remember where each site is located and keep up with information gathering that way.

Google Reader Example