feeds

What is Google Reader and why should you use it?

Google Reader is a free, Web-based reader for RSS feeds. You can find feeds on nearly every Web site. RSS feeds offer a simplified view of Web content down to just text, pictures and videos--minus the site's style and formatting, which can sometimes hinder or befuddle casual reading.

Google reader lets you subscribe to these feeds as easily as typing them into your browser's address bar, and lets you read them like you're browsing through e-mail. There are many online RSS readers available, but Google is one of the best. It's easy to get a grip on Google Reader basics, but there are several tips and tricks that can make it extremely productive.

Setup: Finding RSS Feeds

As mentioned earlier, nearly every site has an RSS feed, and you can usually find it by scrolling around and hunting for the little RSS logo (a little orange box with three white waves). What makes Google Reader particularly useful is that it can take any old Web site URL and find the RSS feed on its own. If you don't quite remember the name of the site, or the exact URL, Google Reader has a built in directory you can search by keyword. There's also a neat feature called "bundles" that has over a dozen themed groups of preselected feeds you can subscribe to at once. Adding one of these bundles organizes the newly subscribed feeds into a handy folder.

Organizing

Once you get going with Google Reader, you'll likely have a bunch of sites that need organizing into groups. The easiest tool to handle this is folders. To begin this process, just click on manage subscriptions in the lower left-hand corner of Google Reader's main page. This will take you to an options menu where you can create and delete folders and feeds, as well as quickly categorize the feeds you have into folders.

To change or make a new folder, there's a drop-down menu on the far right side of each feed. To make a new folder, click on it, and pick the New Folder option. After naming it, the feed you clicked on in the first place will automatically be sorted into this folder. Once you've created a folder, you can quickly add several feeds by clicking the drop-down button on the far right to change folders.

Seasoned Gmail users might be familiar with "starring" and labeling, Google's simplified version of managing feeds and stories instead of folders. Google Reader is no different, letting you star or tag posts with labels for quick sorting later on. There are two ways to star a story--either click on the star icon on the top left of a story, or add star option on the bottom left. To read through just starred items, pick the starred items feed on the top left menu.

Labeling is a slightly more complicated affair, but a powerful tool to swap through genres of feeds with just a few keystrokes. Like stars, you can tag any feed item on the fly by clicking the edit tags button on the lower right hand side of the story. You'll notice right away the story has automatically been tagged with its parent folder. To actually search through tags, you'll have to use a simple keyboard shortcut by pressing G followed by T. This will pull up an overlay that lets you sort through stories by tag using your keyboard arrows. We'll get into more depth on keyboard shortcuts in the advanced tidbits section below.

Continue reading to learn how to read and share feeds, along with some advanced tidbits for taking your reading to the next level.

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SportSnipe is a new single-page aggregator the likes of Original Signal, PopUrls, and others, although it's focused specifically on sports feeds from all over the world. Users can browse through headlines and video thumbnails for various leagues, genres, and teams. Like Original Signal, SportSnipe has the option to hover over any headline to read the first few lines of the story, along with a comment button that lets registered users add their own commentary to the story--separate of the parent site.

The service claims to pull its headlines from over 1,300 different sports feeds. It also doubles as a regular old build-it-yourself feed aggregator similar to Netvibes and PageFlakes, albeit a little less flashy. Users can add RSS feeds as either text or video feeds. The video feed catcher is especially cool and gives you a little thumbnail for each clip. If you do this with a text feed, you won't get anything but a black box.

SportSnipe has a few ways to sort and share content. You can bookmark pages you'd like to share with others through a variety of social bookmarking sites. You can also turn off comments and hover over previews. With a quick toggle you can rearrange the feed boxes and extend the feeds to see more than just a few headlines. There are also embed codes for putting your feeds on a blog, Web site, or social networking profile (which I've done to the right.)

In many ways, SportSnipe isn't very original as a single-page aggregator. Pageflakes and Netvibes do a much better job with their presentation, and the resemblance to Popurls and Original Signal is unquestionable. However, SportSnipe has a really great directory of sports feeds that aggregate quickly and are far more comprehensive than what Original Signal offers. The video feed implementation is a nice touch as well.

More screens after the jump. … Read more

FeedBurner has announced that both its Stats PRO and MyBrand services will be free from now on. This news is coming a little over a month after Google acquired FeedBurner at the end of May. I will admit that I was a little skeptical when Google bought FeedBurner as to how it would affect the actual service, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

FeedBurner's Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that FeedBurner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called "reach" and also item views. As opposed to … Read more

This simple and flexible feed reader for iPhone lets you decide what news you want to see. Simply find the RSS link (.xml link) on your favorite news site and add the URL using iPhone Feed Reader's simple interface. We like the simple interface and the ability to hit the All Feeds button for short summaries of stories. Though there's not a lot in the way of customization, iPhone Feed Reader is a great place to store and access your favorite RSS feeds.

iPhone link: http://www.iphonefeedreader.com/ifeeds/index.php

Web site link: http://www.iphonefeedreader.com/… Read more

Category: Publishing

FeedBurner is a service for blog or Web site owners to keep track of who is subscribing to their RSS feeds. Users who sign up their blogs can keep track of readership statistics, along with where their content is being syndicated or linked to. FeedBurner also offers its services to Podcast creators, helping them keep track of how many people are subscribing to their shows.

In addition to a free service, FeedBurner also offers a pro version that gives more extensive statistics and is aimed primarily at advertisers and content owners who need a really detailed outline of … Read more

HeyCast is a new service from the folks that made HeyWatch [review], the online video conversion service. It lets you grab videos from popular hosting sites such as YouTube, Google Video, and Apple's Quicktime movie trailers site, and clump them together into a handy RSS feed you or anyone else can subscribe to in iTunes or other feed readers. The feed isn't just your standard RSS though--HeyCast grabs the Flash videos, converts them, and makes them available for offline viewing on your computer or portable devices.

I gave it a go this morning and came across a few … Read more

There's the temptation to start talking about the Democracy Player with a Lord of the Rings-esque, "One Player to Rule Them All" joke, but that wouldn't be very democratic, would it?

The latest version of the open-source Democracy Player contains some serious upgrades that make it worth a second look, if you haven't liked it in the past. The most important improvement is that the publisher, the Participatory Culture Foundation, seems to have worked through most of program's early stability issues. After tooling around with the player for hours on Windows Vista, it neither crushed my system's memory usage nor crashed. Memory usage and stability have been major issues for the plucky little player, and I suspect they will continue to be. But at least it wasn't gathering piles of RAM like a YouTube-obsessed squirrel fearing the approaching winter.… Read more

I have a Twitter account. So do a handful of CNET's other bloggers (Rafe is Mr. Popular). Maybe you have one, too. Want to know who else does? Several of the telescopes at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK, that's who.

A British astronomy fan, who operates the aptly-named Astronomy Blog, has set up Twitter accounts for the observation targets of several of Jodrell Bank's telescopes and is aggregating the feeds here. You probably won't see these Twitter feeds saying "starbucks run" or "cat knocked over flowerpot, arrrgh,&… Read more

Nintendo Wii owners who have been enjoying their updated Web browser can now enjoy a special version of Google Reader designed exclusively for their Wii remotes and TV screens. Google has made the text a little bigger and changed the interface from a two-pane look to a simple feeds list.

One big change regular Google Reader users are bound to notice is the updated control scheme. To jump between feeds just hit the "1" button, which pulls up a slick looking pop-up with a listing of all your feeds. It's almost an easier system than the one … Read more