thoughts on google reader

Recently, a buddy clued me into Google Reader. What is it? For my geek friends, it’s an RSS reader. For my normal friends, think of it as “an inbox for the web” (and go view the 2 minute intro video to learn more).

I’ve more or less resisted joining the RSS revolution for a while, trying to shoehorn new technology into an old paradigm (dang, I think that sentence pushed me over the edge and now I must label this entry as “geek”). What I would do is add interesting links to my del.icio.us account with various tags. I would then subscribe to the RSS feeds of those tags using Firefox’s built in support. Voila, portable bookmarks.

After playing with google reader for a bit, I’m converted over to the new way of thinking, which is, use an RSS aggregator to organize the various feeds out there on the web for you. I came to this conclusion for a simple reason: push vs. pull (dang, even though this blog is buzzword heavy, I can’t even use current buzzwords… I think the whole push vs. pull debated ended in 1999 after Pointcast died or whatever). Anyhow, let me ‘splain…

In the bad old days, I resisted adding extra bookmarks unless the blog or site had really good stuff. Reason being, it’s a lot of work to visit all those sites every day just to see what new stuff popped up. My own limit was something around 20 sites a day; anything beyond that, and I would basically just become saturated and not be able to take in any more information. So I regularly culled out old stuff that I wasn’t as interested in anymore, and added new blogs as they piqued my interest.

Hard stop. Using google reader, I can probably subscribe to 5x the number of interesting blogs because a) the reader pulls the information for you and puts it all in one place and b) (this is the important one) you can then read it at your leisure. Just like an inbox for the web. So sites that update every hour can sit right next to sites that update every few days, and the amount of work that you do is the same. Verrrrry nice.

Of course, being a google product, it’s extra nice, since I’ve already got a handy dandy google login and don’t have to create a new account somewhere. Also, since it’s a web service, I don’t have to worry about cross-platform headaches — it’ll work in Firefox whether I’m reading on my mac mini, my windows laptop, or my linux workstation. Any computer with a browser allows me to read stuff that I’m interested in. Bonus feature of not having to read crappy Adsense ads splattered all over in desparate attempts to monetize their blogs. (Yes, I know I have Adsense on my own blog, but the ad units are at the bottom of each individual archived post, not inline in the text itself, so they’re unobtrusive, so go away.) I did have to block a new site called “pheedo” in my adblock, though, since somehow they’ve figured out how to insert annoying ads into RSS feeds. Whatever, problem solved.

I’ve converted almost my entire blogroll over to it. There are still a few holdouts, and this leads to my new set of major annoyances with blogs in today’s world. Major annoyance #1 are sites that don’t publish feeds! WTF? Get on the bandwagon, memepool and random friends who use weirdo lame blogging software/sites that don’t publish feeds… You are making me inefficient.

Less annoying than #1 but still very annoying are the sites that only publish excerpts. Listen to me guys, I don’t want to read posts on your site using your color scheme and your fonts and your publishing schedule. I don’t want to click over to your site. I want to stay in my little world and read what you have to say. Are you listening to me, Andrew Sullivan and Wired news? (answer: probably not; and also, I shouldn’t pick on Sullivan since he did get rid of his horrible white-on-purple-weirdo-serif-font-impossible-to-read-color-scheme, but still, you get the point). Publish your whole feed, please.

Finally, there are sites which I will probably never put into google reader, which interestingly enough, are the online equivalents of dead trees newspapers: the CSM (a site I read because it’s good) and the Coloradoan (a site I read because it’s there). Thanks to their dead trees roots (har har), they still use layout to differentiate important stories from fluffier stuff. So their interesting stuff is either centered, or way above the fold, uses larger fonts, and just stand out more overall. The stories I care less about are either sidebar links or tucked away somewhere else out of site. This works well for me, since I can just visually scan the page and have a good chance that I’ll click on an article I care about. The interesting paradox with their RSS feeds though, is that with all layout removed, then all the content looks equally important. It’s really hard to tell which is a headline story written by a seasoned reporter with lots of research, and which stories are “local cat show delights all” type crapola. So I won’t read their RSS feeds. We’ll see if these sites are even around in 10 years.

Anyhow, that’s enough nerdiness for one day. Give google reader a shot.