Sunday, 25 November 2007

Google Reader

Yesterday morning, I suddenly looked at the Internet differently.

I woke up, checked the usual sites I go to, and then thought 'Hang on; I usually just click through a whole lot of sites checking whether they have any new content.

I mean, they probably have RSS feeds, but even the built-in RSS reader in Firefox isn't that flash hot.

I'll google for something - online so I can use it from different machines.'

And link number one was Google Reader.

I've gone from 20+ links in my Firebox bookmarks bar to 10, a third of which are websites for my wife to check the current weather on and exchange rate on, and the rest short cuts to the various Google tools I use.

And I've started reading the Internet on one screen. What's more every time I find someone saying something intelligent, I'll add their blog to Google Reader. I'm up to 38 links and growing fast. And I'm so much more time efficient I end up having to write blog entries to fill up the rest of my day.

Has anyone else had this revelation yet?
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7 comments:

  1. Unknown25 November 2007 at 21:34

    I read your blog on Google Reader since I first discovered it. Only gotcha (not really Google Reader's fault, but rather a RSS limitation) -- the first time you sign up for a feed you only get the latest 10 (most times, this is site-dependent), which means that for older content you still need to visit the original site (which I am doing right now with 'Ascii Dreams' in order to catch up with your fast-paced posts). =)

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  2. Gavin25 November 2007 at 22:29

    Ben using the google reader for years. Any interesting site gets popped into the feed reader. Only thing is every few months I have to comb through the feeds and remove ones which have too high an SNR or which just aren't valuable. I'm up to 170 feeds at the moment: I'm sure a pruning isn't far off :)

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  3. Unknown25 November 2007 at 22:40

    Gavin, you could try AideRSS (http://www.aiderss.com/), which provides filtered versions of your feeds. It acts as a proxy for your RSS feeds, allowing only relevant posts (which you can rank yourself) through. Pretty neat stuff.

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  4. Unknown26 November 2007 at 00:59

    I used Vienna Reader for OSX for a while, but Google Reader is unf#$%^&believable.

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  5. Unknown26 November 2007 at 02:36

    Probably the greatest "aha" moment I had in the past month. Congrats.

    Of course, be careful - it is easy to binge... especially if you have 83 subscriptions. It sounds like you are about to get there yourself. =)

    Happy Web 2.0-ing.

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  6. Kleedrac27 November 2007 at 06:21

    Ulisses Montenegro beat me to the punch (and probably a bit more eloquently :P) ... same story ... literally verbatim :P
    Kleedrac

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  7. jagwio27 November 2007 at 07:45

    LOL. I have been subscribed to your blog for a few weeks now (Google Reader is great).

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