Tag: google reader

A New RSS reader

September 18, 2010 / / 2 Comments

Our culture is operating faster than the printed page.  And though I think there is still a great place for books and magazines, if you don’t read blogs, you’re missing out on the cutting edge of information and idea transfer.

I like to keep up with blogs.  In fact, there are over 100 I (try to) check regularly.  And the more and more I find that are good, the more and more I subscribe to.  And the more and more I subscribe to, the more and more content I have coming through.  And the more and more content I have coming through, the further and further I get behind in trying to keep up with it.

New posts go up at random times on random days, and, since I’ve got a family, a job, hobbies, and lots of other things to fill my time, I don’t always catch when new content is posted.  And though Google Reader helps (I wrote on it HERE), I just don’t check it enough, leaving me with hundreds of unread posts.  And I feel really bad, but I often end up “Marking all Read.”  It’s not that I don’t want to read them…I just get so far behind that I don’t have time to catch up.

But I think I’ve found the solution.

NetNewsWire. **

It is an app that you can run in your back ground on your Mac or PC.  It syncs with Google Reader, and automatically uploads all of your new feeds into its browser.

Here are the features I like:

1. Easy to comment. I can click through and make a comment on a blog, without leaving the application.  This is a huge win for me.  It’s quick and easy to leave a comment on somebody’s post, because I don’t have to open up a separate window.

2. Latest News. I’m able to sort all of the updates by the latest post, and even condense it down to just the ones that were posted in the last 24 hours.

3. Updates throughout the day. I have mine set to update my feeds every 4 hours, so a couple of times a day, I’m alerted (via a pop-up window on my screen) that there are new feeds.  At that point, it takes  10 minutes (or less) to read them all.

4. It syncs with my phone. This is a huge plus for me, and part of the reason I didn’t find myself keeping up to date with my Google Reader feeds.  If I have an extra few minutes, I can just open up the app on my phone, read my updated feeds, and it will be synced up with my computer next time I log on.

5. Organized feeds. Like Google Reader, I can organize my feeds by folders (and it automatically picks up your existing folders form Google Reader).

6. Quick sharing. I can quickly and easily email the link to a particular post to others I think may benefit from it.  Though I wish I could also update to social media sites…

7. I can subscribe to other feeds within the app. I can quickly and easily add feeds that I want to read…very similar to Google Reader.

8. It’s free. I probably wouldn’t have tried it if it weren’t.

So, you see, it’s similar to Google Reader.  The main difference for me, because of the frequency of the automatic updates and the usage on my phone, is that I actually find myself using it consistently.

Do you read many blogs?  Which do you read?  What are your favorites?

**This post has not been solicited by NetNewsWire.

 

Google Reader

June 14, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Before the invention of newspaper deliver services, if you wanted the daily news, you had to visit a newsstand.  And if you wanted more than one newspaper, you were having to go to more than one newsstand every morning to purchase the papers (in hopes that they were still available by the time you arrived).

But then things changed.  Enter the newspaper subscription service.

Wake up.  Walk to your front porch.  Bam…you’ve got your newspapers waiting on you every day.  Genius.

Convenience for you.  Guaranteed service for you.  Guaranteed sales for the newspaper industry.

But when news began to be offered increasingly online (through media outlets and blogs), we as a consumer industry fell right back into the days of walking to multiple newsstands.  We would peruse multiple sites, visit countless blogs, and still not get all of the great news that was available.  Because for every site you checked, there were 1,000 others you didn’t check.  And it just wasn’t feasible to keep up with all of the blogs you found helpful, because you would forget to check them for a few days (or a few weeks), and when you finally remembered, you were way behind.

It’s time to make the internet work for us.

Google Reader

Enter the automated delivery service for digital media: RSS (Really Simple Syndication).  Google Reader is my feed reader of choice.  It gathers all of the new content from the blogs and sites that I visit, and keeps me from having to visit each of those sites individually.  And I can read this content on any computer or mobile phone by simply logging into my account.  Here’s how to get started:

1. Register for a Google Reader account.

2. Come back to my site and click the “RSS” link.

The next step is to visit the sites you love, and look for this symbol: Just click on that button (to the right), and it will prompt you to subscribe to their content.  Simple.

Here are some of the small group sites (some not solely focused on group life) that I have on my Google Reader:

Google Reader is free.  And it keeps you from having to visit multiple newsstands every day.

Did I miss any blogs that are small groups-related?


 

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