Using Google Reader

If your online reading habits are anything like mine, you might find the blogosphere to be a double-edged sword. The good news is that I've been able to find blogs about virtually everything I am interested in, professionally and personally; the bad news is (like my interests) these are spread out all over the place, some on Blogger, some on Wordpress, some elsewhere. Keeping up with all of these is pretty time-consuming.

At least, it used to be. Enter Google Reader, one of many feed readers (aka aggregators) avaliable--for free--on the Internet. Essentially, it allows you to read multiple blogs from one location.

This might not sound all that great--after all, this is similar to what a blogroll does. But a feed reader will automatically tell you when new content is posted to each of the blogs you read. This means no more wandering from site to site, wondering if there is anything that you haven't read. I imagine this technology would be particularly useful for instructors who having students write individual blogs (especially if they are not linked to each other).

Setup is easy: you all have a Google Account already, so just sign in as you would in Blogger with your name and password here. This is what my reader looks like, just to give you a basic idea:

(Click on the image for closer inspection, sorry)

You'll notice that most of the screen real estate is taken up to display the blog posts themselves--here, for example, two separate blogs are represented that fall under the category of "blog RA fall 2007," which is my tag for everything related to this project. You'll notice that I have separate folders for cooking, friends, and music, just in case I want to read from only one of those areas at a time. It's nice.

Even better: your blogs are now searchable. Looking to track down all the posts of a specific student? Type his/her handle in the search box. Perhaps you remember an interesting post someone made about, oh, semiotics, but can't for the life of you recall when it was said or who said it. Again, harness the power of the Google search engine at the top.

The help section of the Google Reader is great, and I should mention that there are other programs/websites that accomplish these same tasks; this is simply the one I use and prefer. This aggregator is actually much more sophisticated than I'm letting on right now, but I don't want to overwhelm anyone. Sorry if I already failed you on that one.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope this is useful for you, dear readers.

JB

ps - Google: hire me!