Chances are most of your favorite Web sites offer a “feed” of their content in a format known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication). You have probably seen the orange RSS icon or links to “subscribe” while browsing the Web.
RSS takes content from a Web page and places it into a small document that is stripped of a site’s formatting. Some sites include all content so you can receive full text of blog entries or articles along with pictures, video and even mp3s of podcasts. Other sites only provide a headline and a brief description of their content.
With this feed you can use a “reader” to access sites content. The benefit is that you will be able to see when the site is updated in your reader and at the very least read a brief description of what was posted.
Some sites offer multiple feeds, for instance you can subscribe to different sections of the New York Times like Technology or Jobs. Many social networking sites also utilize feeds. For example you can subscribe to tweets from Twitter, status updates from Facebook and links from Delicious.
Getting a Reader
There are thousands of different readers available to choose from. Current versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox have feed readers built-in and Safari can read feeds and send them to different applications. Programs and sites you probably already use like Microsoft Outlook, Mail.app and Facebook can read feeds as well.
There are also several different applications you can download and install on your desktop.
Google Reader
The easiest to use feed reader in my opinion is the free Google Reader. You can subscribe to all of your feeds, organize them into folders and the site will automatically update each feed so you never have to hit the refresh button. The reader integrates with Google Buzz and contains ways to mark individual entries so you can access them later.
Setting Things Up
Almost all sites are setup so that a reader will be able to find the feed simply by entering the address. In Google Reader simply hit the “Add a Subscription” button and type in the Web address. Your feed will now appear with the total number of new entries.
You will also see an RSS icon appear in the address bar of most browsers when a feed is available. There are still some sites that do not auto list their RSS feeds so look around for the orange button or a link somewhere on the page (you can always hit cntrl F and search for the word RSS as a last resort).
To read a feed you simple click on it and the entries will appear. As you scroll down each individual entry will be marked as read. You have the option to mark all items as read (handy if you forget to check the reader for a day or two and a feed has built up several hundred new items).
You can organize these feeds into folders to better manage them.
Creating a Workflow
Google Reader allows you to “star” entries in feeds and you can click on the star entry link to view them later. One trick I do is to open up individual feeds and scroll through them quickly; starring only the entries I might actually want to read. I follow hundreds of feeds on a wide variety of subjects, many of them related to work. Out of those hundreds of feeds there are only a few entries I actually want to read so starring them and discarding the rest saves a great deal of time.
After I have cleaned the reader of all new entries I look over those I starred. Ones I want to share or learn more about I leave starred, those I am not interested in I un-star and forget about. If something is really interesting, I save to my Delicious account, spread on Twitter or post to Facebook. This workflow allows me to keep up with hundreds of Web sites and keep current on many different topics.
Mobile
The mobile version of Google Reader is available through your Smart Phones browser and contains most of the functionality of the site.















