An excellent way to get the best content
I recently discovered Google Reader, and it has changed how I interact with the web in general, and blogs in particular. As it becomes more widely used, I expect it to have even more of an impact.
In principle, the Reader is a simple aggregator of RSS feeds, just like Netvibes and many others like it. I like the way the feeds and stories are laid out in a hierarchical manner that unsurprisingly resembles gmail a lot, but this is not the killer feature.
What has the potential to make it huge is the way in which it allows you to mark stories for
sharing. When you click Share on a story, it is automatically added to a new RSS feed that others can subscribe to - and this is really cool as it allows you to subscribe to filtered feeds from people that you share an interest with, and thus get only the best content in your inbox.
Google clearly realizes that this is cool; shared stories are made available on other ways too: either as an excerpt that you can add to your web page (shown in the image on the right) or as a complete new page that contains all of your shared articles.
There is even a plugin for facebook that shows your shared stories - I have of course added this to my facebook page. It shows your friends’ Shared stories as well as the overall top shared stories and so is a great way of finding the best content out there.
All of this means that there you can get a higher quality daily blog fix than before much easier. If you are interested in seeing which items I have shared, feel free to use my feed or the complete shared page that Google makes available.
Eventually, Google will probably add an easier way of finding the really good feeds too - in the meantime, please add a comment with a link to your own Shared Feed and we can start the process right here!
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