6/01/2007

My Personal Google Reader Review

After I have tried Post2Blog, which I decided to use to all my on going blog postings, I started to look into other blog related tools that are popular among blogsphere.

The new tool I was looking into was not so much to help my blogging but to help me read other people’s blog posts. With my love for Google, it was natural for me to try out the Google Reader. I know this had been out for quite a while now and millions of people are already using it. However, I just wanted to add my review contribution to this for some of you who are not yet familiar with the tool.

When I logged into Google Reader and started the basic configuration with their default interest blogs and started adding some of the blogs that I enjoyed reading. Soon enough, I had literally hundreds of blogs all put together just like my gmail! You can make folders based on the blog interests for your likings and you can expand or compress them if you’d like.

When you click on the folder rather then the blog themselves, it even puts all the blog posting altogether within a long expanded view in chronological order! This definitely is a wonderful idea. You can even "Star" or share the items that you would like to make importance out of or share with other people. It even give with trend statistics of your reading habits! Like Gmail, it also enable you to add tags! Not only that, it extracts the posts only from each of the blogs, getting rid of all the annoying advertisements and other non-related items on the main site!This is all I wanted and more from blog reading experiences!

Technically, everything is very sound on the Google Reader. Only thing I found annoying is, now that everything is put together into one long expanded page, it seems like I put less importance to each of the posts and find myself simply scrolling through the posts. I am not entirely sure why. I think most of it is related to psychological effect of knowing how many new posts are posted and are there to read. The completeness oriented guy that I am, I need to get things done ASAP or read through them ASAP. When there are lot more posts to go through, my mind is not at ease. Perhaps that’s majority of the problem me skimming through most of the posts with the Google Reader.

Overall, I love the tool. Personally I hate it because of my skimming habits that I’m starting to build with this. I’m sure over time, I’ll learn to get used to it.

If you are one of those people who are using one of blog reading tools, please let me know how you like each of the tools.

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