I was late coming into the whole RSS feed thing. My replies to it's proponents were:"Why do I need to gather all entries from the blogs into one place. "
"I don't have that many sites I follow and, anyway, I already have them bookmarked. "
"It's just one more techno-geeky thing for me to take on. "
That last item was my downfall. I am a techno-geeky kind of guy! After reading yet another blog entry talking about how easy Google Reader was to use and set-up, I gave in and gave it a try.
I love my feeder.
An RSS feeder gathers together the information you request in one easy accessible location. It is the ideal newspaper that contains only the stories you want. A newspaper that allows you to tag and manipulate the articles for future reference. A newspaper that you can continually adapt to meet your changing needs.
I used to follow about 15 websites/blogs daily. I had a job that was eating into my read time (work can be such a bother). That's when I set up Google Reader. It allowed me to get my daily news fix in a fraction of the time and have extra minutes for other activities like talking to my wife.
One note of caution. Adding feeds to your reader can be addicting. I now follow about a hundred sites. I've been subscribed to several hundred. I was suddenly spending way too much time catching up on the latest information. So, I evaluated the feeds I had and trimmed out half. Now I make it a monthly practice to get rid of feeds that no longer interest me, are repetitive of other sites or in some cases give me too much information to fast and too often.
[Image: Screenshot from my Google Reader setup]
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