Google Reader!

I spend a lot of time on the computer for work, to communicate with many people, and also many of my hobbies and interests involve computer usage to some extent. I also read a number of blogs.

This can all be time consuming. However, I found a little-known service that helps a bit! Google has a (still beta) service which basically gives you a nice interface to keep track of various XML site feeds. These feeds basically provide "Google Reader" with a list of content, and then Google Reader determines whether anything is new since you last checked. In Google Reader you define a list of sites you want to have on your list (in my case a list of blogs), and it combines all of their articles into one place. I can read them right from Google Reader and when I view any one of them, they are marked as "Read" and are hidden. You can also "Star" articles to give them some persistence (works the same way that "Stars "work in Google Mail).

So, instead of going to 15-20 Blogs to determined whether there are any new articles, I go to one place (Google Reader) and see my list of articles. This, in my mind, is very nifty.

Of course, this doesn't only apply to blogs, but basically any site that is syndicating its content through an XML feed. Unfortunately, some blogs may not offer an XML feed--but most do, even when run by people that are not very technologically savy. The reason being, most large blogging services provide it by default (ie. Blogger.com, by default, provides a feed with each blog at the path http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml).

The service isn't exactly bug-free or refined, but it really has a lot of potential!

Related Tags: google, internet, computers, blogs, rss