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Boosting Online Productivity: Google Reader

Google ReaderSince 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…

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