Google Reader

This post isn’t for those of you who already have your own favorite way of keeping track of blogs and websites that you frequent regularly. It is directed towards those folks out there who, like myself a year ago, really want to read all the interesting things people were posting and updating frequently but are getting overwhelmed by all the data.

Google Reader keeps track of blogs (such as this one) for you, keeping all the posts in on convenient place. You can read the full explanation at wikipedia. Basically you subscribe to as many blogs as you want and you can organize them and categorize them. It makes keeping up to date on a large number of blogs very simple. (I do suggest you turn off the numbered counts that appear beside each blog — they tell you how many posts that you have left unread but I found that stressful… instead I set the option so that blogs with new posts simply appear as bold text).

So I can keep track of other writers I respect, political commentators, research blogs and even a few websites like the Fix which hosts reviews of magazines I have been published in. Now I don’t need to keep on going back to the site and checking if a new review has been posted, it will just appear in Google Reader for me.

There are plently of other blog readers out there, so I’m not saying Google Reader is the best. But it works for me.