Google Reader

Have I been living in an internet cave, or something? How did I not know this existed until a few days ago when I spotted it in my referer list?

This Google Reader is going to save me an incredible amount of time checking blogs daily. Now, when you update your blog, it tells me. I can read what you’ve posted in the Google Reader, or I can click one button to be transported to your site to read the post and comment. Wicked! Yes, I am clearly behind the times on this, but I know I’m not the only one.

For Dr Anonymous who posted a while ago about bitacle stealing content – I think how bitacle is doing what they are doing is via an RSS feed. Bloglines do it as well as Google Reader. You can turn this off with your blog, if you like – that way if someone wants to read what you’ve written, they have to physically visit your page. Otherwise, they can use a tool like Bloglines or Google Reader (and there’s probably others I don’t know of too) to grab your posts and read them.

Other options include changing your blog to only show a few lines of your post and then people have to click on “continue reading” so they have to visit your blog to see the rest of your post. I personally don’t love blogs that do that but if I’m a reader of yours already I’m not going to stop reading you just because you do that. ;) However, if I’m visiting NaBloPoMo blogs, I’m generally not going to click on continue reading, I find that I click on the little red cross instead. It’s just annoying, no offense to anyone.

So with Google reader you can “share” posts with others. Have a look, for example, here. So I could put that link in my sidebar, and then people can read the posts of bloggers that I share. It’s done on a one by one basis, you can’t just pick a blogger and share all their posts, by the look of things.

If you’re a blogger that I read often (and you guys know who you are, in general) and you’d be ok with me sharing your posts in this manner, please either comment here or shoot me an email. I’m hoping I can eventually put the shared things into a box on the sidebar, when I work out how to do it, so people would be able to see the title of your post and it would have the most recently shared things.

So, don’t be surprised when I am commenting on your latest posts within nanoseconds, or wonder why you’re not seeing me on your site meter daily. I’ll be there, when you post, cos I love you guys and want to read what you have to say when you have to say it. As opposed to a daily check in like I used to do. ;)

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blogging tips, feed readers, google reader

4 thoughts on “Google Reader

  1. Well, I’m not one of the blogs you read daily/often/once in a blue moon but I appreciate you stopping by a few days ago. We’re all just one of a multitude of little boats bobbing in the Internetia Ocean.

  2. I don’t mind the truncated feeds, especially as Blogigo doesn’t give me an option – mine are truncated anyway. Usually, as I’m on dial-up and using Firefox, I open several blogs in several tabs, disconnect, get some coffee, and read. Then I go back in and get more. This does mean, though, that I feel a little miffed when I find one of the blogs has ‘click here to read more’ and I’ve already gone offline! Sometimes I follow the link when I go back online, but it depends how curious I was in the first place.

    I haven’t heard of this ‘shared posts’ thing before. I will have to look when there’s time. The blogosphere is always coming up with surprises!

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