To barrow a line from Mark Twain, the reports of RSS’s death have been greatly exaggertated. Okay, so RSS readers aren’t used by a lot of people, but they really should be.
Products like Google Reader allow you to keep everything you love online organized, categorized and quickly viewable in one place. Google Reader specifically allows you to take your reading with you and share it with others.
Google Reader can also make your web-reading work flow a lot more organized and streamlined. If you’re regularly blogging about topics in the news, Reader will allow you peruse headlines, highlight the items you want to look into further using the “star” feature, and thereby quickly create a reading list for your daily blogging.
This isn’t just limited to your PC or Mac, you can take reader with you and use it fill many of the otherwise unproductive parts of your day. My favorite mobile reader app is Byline for the iPhone, a great interface that allow for quick reading, starring, sharing, and has nice little features like “Mail Link to this Page” which makes for quick sharing with non-users of Google Reader.
If you’re using an Android-based phone, Google Reader is, of course, supported and several alternative interfaces to Google’s own can be found in the app store. If you’re using a BlackBerry or another mobile device, you can check out google.com/mobile/more to see what applications are available for your phone.
For people working in groups, Google Reader can be an incredible resource. The sharing feature allows group blogs and other writers working in teams to quickly move good stories in front of other writes on their team. Just be sure to be following the shared items of the other writes in your group and you’ll make the discovery process for good fodder for stories take much less time.
Whether you’re a blogger or just a regular reader of more than one blog, by investing the short amount of time to setup and get into the rhythm of using Google Reader, you’ll save time and give yourself a bunch of tools to do more with what you’re reading.
Check out this video by the folks behind Google Reader to get familiar with the basics:
Update: Mashable covers a new feature in Google Reader that allows you to follow ANY webpage, even if it isn’t associated with an RSS feed.
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