I signed up for Google Reader back in December, so here are my five reasons why you should use it, too:
- See all of your blog reading aggregated in one place. This saves me a TON of time, because I just scroll through all the new posts and decide what's worth reading.
- Don't waste time visiting blogs that haven't been updated. Before I signed up for RSS, I spent quite a bit of time each morning checking blogs that didn't have any new content, hoping maybe this would be the day for a new post.
- Get recommendations on related blogs. When you sign into Google Reader, it suggests other blogs that you might like based on the content that is currently in your feeds (similar to Amazon.com recommendations). This is a good way to discover new blogs.
- Find out what your contacts are reading. If your Gmail contacts choose to share their feeds, then you can see what they're reading and discover new blogs that way, too.
- Show your favorite bloggers some love by subscribing to their feeds. Yes, you should still comment regularly, but subscribing to their feed is another way to voice your support. Bloggers love big numbers (at least this blogger does, so sign up for my RSS feed here).
4 comments:
This is a timely post for me as I am new to blogs. Within the last couple of days I set up Google reader to have a blog reader at any computer I sign into and also have set up my email client (Mozilla Thunderbird) as a blog reader. RSS does simplify the whole deal as you say in this post.
I'd never be able to read as many blogs as I do without using RSS. I just use Internet Explorer - I've tried Google Reader and others, but the simple list in IE works for me.
Mark and Lillie, thanks for the comments and spread the word about the wonderfulness that is RSS!
Just this week (or was it last week, things move so fast at times), I signed up for the Google Reader as well. It's so simple to use and such a time saver.
Ok, it's not as immediate as could be expected, but it still is better than going to every blog on the chance it was updated as you mentioned.
RSS is probably the best thing which has come around since email itself.
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