Since I started blogging last year, I always had the habit of going to the individual sites to see whether the author had updated his/her blog. The reasons were manyfold:
- I love to be in the “blogging environment”. The design of the blog and all the other sidebar elements we usually have really helps me to understand what the person’s writing about and helps me to engage in the article.
- Whilst I am on the web page, commenting is also a heck of a lot easier as I don’t have to open up new tabs on Firefox and there won’t be any unnecessary loading times.
- Feed readers always gave me the creeps because they were always so cold to look at, with no element of fun - and I had regularly heard the error stories about how Bloglines kept all everything as “Not read”.
I knew however, that this method of visiting a lot of sites and waiting for load times was causing a huge wastage of time. There must be an easier way I thought - and there was/is - feed readers.
As mentioned, I did try out Bloglines for a bit. For all you guys who havn’t experimented in the world of feeds, Bloglines is an online aggregator that autmatically grabs the latest action from your favourite blogs. There are also desktop-based readers for you Outlook junkies out there such as Newsgator and Feed Demon.
Things didn’t go too well. The interface was ugly, sometimes the posts remained unread even though I had “read” them several times, and everything was too clunky and too slow to load. My first venture into the world of RSS therefore was short-lived and I soon returned to checking sites through my list of bookmarks on Firefox.
However, a month ago or so, the new Google Reader was released. I saw a number of reviews from Darren and many others, and of course expertise is everything in the blogosphere. “Another go at RSS won’t hurt me”, I thought - I was giving people my RSS feed everyday and never even knew how it felt to see a new article from Blogtrepreneur appear in my reader!
Subscription to the Google Reader service was easy peasy, as everything just got integrated with my Gmail account. Load times were fairly good as well, and the “Loading” graphic does keep you company (yes, the one with the potion!) whilst you’re waiting for the aggregator side of things to heat up.
The interface felt nice and posts were easy on the eye to read. I immediately added all my favourite blog feeds through the pacy search feature on the reader (unfortunately at the moment, this only amounts to 19 at the moment - but these are my favourite reads). Sorting them into folders took litle more than a few seconds and after that I was away.
Since then, I’ve never looked back. Checking the reader has become a regular feat but one which Im able to do with more ease and pleasure than ever before. And then, there’s the productivity.
Whilst I would like to say that before I was productive, now I am amazed at how much I can get done in so little time. The amount of posts on this blog havn’t been breathtaking but I’m adding more meat to them as a result of the time I can now spend procrastinating and thinking of new takes on post ideas. Issues such as loading times havn’t become so drastic on my working time and I’m able to market my blog more through the increased use of forums and commenting (speaking of which, its actually quite easy to open up multiple tabs in a web browser!).
Would I ever leave the world of RSS? Erm, probably not, considering the new Trends that Google includes with the Reader service (which allows you to view how many posts you have read). Coupled with the fact that I now have more time on my hands to chat with buddies old and new, and I think that the world of feeds is something which should be taken advantage of, even if you don’t publish RSS yourself.
Now…time to demolish some bookmarks…
- Subscribe to our RSS feed for instant updates!
- Receive the latest posts by email
- Add me to your Technorati Favourites
9 responses so far ↓
1 Joel // Feb 5, 2007 at 8:11 pm
I think Google Reader is one of the best things to ever come out of Google. Coupled with Gmail, they certainly make me feel more productive!
2 Allen.H // Feb 5, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Long time no talk Adnan, hope to see you on Gtalk soon =).
Maybe I should try this myself, right now I’m using my Firefox “live bookmarks” feature, which does lead you to the site eventually.
Cheers,
Allen.H
3 Dave Starr // Feb 6, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I’ve had a lot of problems making Google Live Reader ‘behave’ the way Bloglines does for me … funny that we have had virtually the opposite experience. I guess I’ll try it again, because I do like the screenshots I’ve seen for the trends data.
One thing that _is_ kewl with Google Reader is that you can put it in your Google Personal Page. If you blog and/or keep up with world affairs you can’t beat the Personal Page … all the stuff you’re interested in in a neat little format … I have a sub page for each of my blogs so all the info shows up automatically … and with feed reader I can also make blogs on the same subjects show up with one click.
My number one efficiency trick, though, is to read less and write more.
4 adnan // Feb 6, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Thanks for your comments Joel, Allen and Dave.
@ Joel: Yeah Gmail was a breakthrough for me as I was used to Hotmail. I made the change to Google’s service because Hotmail started to be a little buggy and some emails didnt get sent to me.
@ Allen: Yeah we havnt spoken in a while - I’ll probably see you on Gtalk in the evenings this week. I havn’t really experimented with Live Bookmarks mainky because Google Reader is so much more cleaner and aesthetically pleasing.
Finally @ Dave: Hmmm I didn’t really use Bloglines for long enough to make significant judgement on it. But from a technical viewpoint, Google Reader seems to be completely problem free (as in all posts marked as unread remain unread and categorizing is a piece of cake).
I don’t really use Google Personal Page but then again I don’t really track many of the stories from the entrepreneurial world! Maybe this would help me to find more related stories for you entrepreneurial crowd! I’ll probably take a look at that this weekend.
But you’re right, reading is definitely something which should be done less. Content is king and this is what’s gonna help with rankings and traffic. But, marketing is just as important, but only once you’ve got decent content to advertise.
5 SarahG // Feb 7, 2007 at 12:39 am
I agree with you on Google Reader. I used to use Omea Reader but then I read blogs on a couple of different computers and I kept getting annoyed not having my feeds updated. Google Reader keeps it all in one place and is exceptionally easy to use and configure.
I like it now that I can just click an RSS link and suddenly I’ve got Google asking me if I want to add it to my reader or homepage. And the ability to star posts for say future indepth reading is great. I have enough bookmarks as it is in my temp list!
I think the Webmaster Tools gets two thumbs up too
6 Dave Starr // Feb 7, 2007 at 11:08 am
There are a few things re: Google Home page, Google News Alerts and Google reader that all seem to fit together to improve blogger/entrepreneur productivity.
First the home page … put as many or as few items as you want to to keep track of in your daily grind and for blog post materials. It takes all different types of feeds and neatly keeps them updated … CNN, BBC, Business Week, inc., whatever. I also have a separate sub-page (very easy to make) with just the items I like to ‘watch’ for each of my blogs. And a separate page called ‘ours’ for the feeds for the blogs my wife and I maintain. that way i always see what has recently published, where we might be falling behind, or the state of health of our RSS feeds so i know the rest of our readers are getting the posts.
Google News is an email service. you subscribe for any keywords you want to watch and it will automatically scour everything on line for mention of that keyword and send you an email synopsis as it happens or aggregated once a day as you prefer. It’s invaluable for those days when you know you ought to post but you can’t get going … I send my alerts automatically to a folder for each blog and one click there is a whole list of recent ‘news’ about that item, just browse and you’ll have something to write about almost immediately.
And as I think I already mentioned about Google reader … you can put that as sort of a ‘widget’ on your Google Home page so all the RSS feeds you are subscribed to will continually update in a separate little section of the page, you can go on about other things and just jump on something of interest when it comes up.
7 adnan // Feb 7, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Hey Sarah - I havn’t used the star feature although it would help in writing blog posts as I wouldn’t have to sift through hundreds of post to get to the real meat! Yeah I used Webmaster Tools as well. Its nice that Google is giving us something to work on and improve, so that we can have a better chance to better our rankings.
Dave, it seems like you’ve got your blogging research pretty much figured out! Do you charge for this service? Lol. Yeah I think it would take the weekend to get everything sorted out, but yeah, Google’s tools really do try and help increase productivity. Its just a shame that I’m not taking full advantage of everything yet.
Thanks for explaining and for sharing Sarah and Dave!
8 moneymonk // Feb 9, 2007 at 12:31 am
Google Reader works for me, it make blogging a little more less complicated.
9 Shankar Ganesh // Feb 11, 2007 at 11:14 am
Though I love Google’s Products, I prefer netvbies.com to track my favourite blog feeds.
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