Google Reader: More blogs, less time

What better way is there to kickoff the new PoliTech category than to introduce a web service that will help you stay on top of the information wave with little to no effort?

First, a little bit about the technology behind Google Reader. When I recently announced that our feed had been upgraded, I was referring to our RSS feed. RSS is short for Real Simple Syndication. Here is a quick description of RSS use from Wikipedia:

Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ‘subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

So how do you utilize this technology? Go to the Google Reader site and sign up for an account (or use your Gmail account if you have one) and then you can add different feeds to your reader simply by clicking the “Add Subscription” link and typing in your favorite blog or news site address like http://www.gop3.com.

Here are some of the blogs I currently subscribe to (listed as full links so you can just past them in if you would like to subscribe to them as well):

http://www.gop3.coom

http://marquettewarrior.blogspot.com

http://marquettebasketball.blogspot.com

http://freemanhunt.blogspot.com ( Who has a great recent post on Homeschooling)

http://www.michellemalkin.com

http://myfinanceblog.com

http://scrappleface.com

http://techcrunch.com

http://theonorth.com

http://slashdot.org/apple.rss

http://www.murepublicans.com/

After you have added your favorite blogs, you’ll see all the posts from them in chronological order on the right hand side. As you read, Google Reader marks the posts as read so they won’t appear again if you click the “Show only new” link.

So what’s the final kicker? You can also share posts that you like by clicking the share button on the bottom of the post in Google Reader. When an item is shared it appears in your shared feed that you can give others the address too.

If you would care to see the posts that this humble blogger deems share worthy, subscribe to this address as you did earlier in the article:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03873304865611739271

or just look at the Gop3.com Rapid Links on the side of the page.

Feel free to share your favorite feeds in the comment section of this post, even self promotion is welcome.

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