Google Reader is a very valuable tool that I am sure many of you are aware of, however, it has offers more than just keeping up with your favorite XML and RSS feeds. It also gives you the ability to share posts from your subscriptions that you find valuable and would be useful to your friends.
You can mark posts with a star, giving you the ability to come back to posts that you want to revisit. Along with the star option, you can label feeds with tags so you can organize all of your feeds within specific categories. Other valuable options for you to share information that you find via the feeds that you read is the ability to share the post in a couple of different ways:
- Shared Page
- Widget
Email
Sending feeds to people that you think will be able to use is a very efficient way of sharing posts from your feed reader. The Google Reader makes this rather easy to send and incorporates the post along with a message.
Shared Page
Google Reader also offers a great way of sharing information that you find relevant to people who want to know what is on your mind, or at least in your feed reader. Just like adding a star to a valuable post, you have the ease of a single click to share a particular post and this can publish this post through a page or on a widget.
The personal page is the default for all of your posts marked as share (figure 1). Similar to a personalized Google page, or iGoogle, you even have the ability to personalize this page to reflect your personality, or at least reflect your preference (figure 2). Of course, this page has a RSS feed that you can share with others to simplify the reading process by adding it to their feed reader.
figure 1 - Shared Items Page (click for example)
figure 2 - Personalize Your Shared Items Page
Widget
Similar to the shared pages, the widget publishes your shared items from your Google Reader account (figure 3). Easy to set up (figure 4), the Shared Clips Widget has a few different color schemes to choose from, even a version with no formatting for you to customize.
figure 3 - Shared Clips Widget
figure 4 - Shared Clips Widget Setup
What’s the point of all of this?
In my opinion, Google wants you to be able to access the information that you are looking for without the need to republish or rehash the information. Have you ever played the game telephone? The basic gist, for those who answered no, is that a single phrase is whispered in the ear of one person and passed this way through many people until it gets to the end and is told aloud to be verified by the person who started the circle. Typically, the ending information is grossly different then how it began. This can be true even when you are not whispering it into someones ear.
My other thought is that Google wants the information indexed once, by the original author and not republished over and over, filling their index with essentially the same information that they have to sort and determine the author or authority.
Google also offers some tips for publishers of feeds that can help you publish more engaging content for your visitors.
- Write engaging and descriptive headlines.
- Include pictures.
- Don’t overload your users.
Google Reader can be a useful tool for keeping up with information from useful resources.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Theatons Toys 05.28.08 at 7:33 am
Every week google’s releasing a new ‘powerful tool’.. i don’t think hardly anyone uses these.. only search, analytics and adwords.
Google is always trying to be the king of everything and i for one am sick of it !
Good post though.
pittfall 05.28.08 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the kudos on the post!
As the web, not just Google, gets more robust, everyone will need to be willing and considerate of setting their online boundaries. As these and other options to tools or services that we use and share, like a Swiss Army pocket knife. If you have one, can you really say that you have used every tool included, probably not, or at least not for the intended purpose! But that doesn’t mean that they don’t serve the purpose that you bought it for.