I use RSS feeds to read just about everything now. Ever since I started keeping track of more than two daily blogs, it just took too much time to visit the website and try to remember what I have or haven’t read. This also applies to friends’ blogs and is a great way to get rid of things like bookmarking and del.icio.us if you use the starring and the tagging features in most feed readers.

Here is a screenshot of my google reader. I have been working all day reading all these articles so that I could get a clean screenshot. Because of the volume of blogs that I am following, it usually takes me about half a day, every other day to read and clear out articles that I don’t want to read.

My favorite features are the search and the tagging features in Google Reader. My current list of article tags is huge, but it makes it so that I can easily find that article I read once, regardless of which blog posted it, and I can look for what I would call it, not necessarily what the authors called it. This also lets me keep lists and groups of articles relevant to a certain subject, such as my computer repair business, and ends up being a great resource when I need to look up something quickly.

RSS feeds are also very important if you have your own blog. They make it so that your content is more available to your readers, and so that readers can get your content regularly instead of having to visit the site. So it means more readers, and it is much easier to count your readers as well. I use feedburner (feedburner.com) to create and monitor my RSS feed, and it is great. It allows for a ton of tracking features and has marketing and lots of other things to make your RSS feed better.

-aliencam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Life in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.