Faster RSS Feed Reading with Google Reader

If you’re like me, you have loads of RSS feeds in your RSS reader, but there never seems to be enough time to read it all. How many of those RSS feed stories do you actually read? 10%? 20%? Very few blogs have content that you want to read all the time, so here’s my little tip on skim-reading the feeds using Google Reader.

The advantages of using Google Reader for your RSS feed are numerous. Here are some of my personal reasons for using it:

1. Feeds anywhere, any place.

Just like using webmail such as Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, etc, you can access your RSS feeds anywhere in the world. If you use a number of different computers, it saves you messing around working out what articles you have or haven’t read already.

2. Articles whilst you sleep.

As far as I know, all RSS feed reader software (that you install on a PC) will only download RSS feeds whilst the PC is switched on. So if your PC is switched off for long periods of time, you will miss news articles. The Google Reader will download RSS feeds regardless of what your computer is doing, since Google handles the RSS feed downloading on their servers.

3. Star that, Share That.

Google Reader has the star and share flags that allow you to ‘bookmark’ or share news stories respectively. Although I’d like to see the star flag turned into a label, so that you can flag different stories as different areas of interests, it’s a nice start. Very useful in the depths of your RSS feeds to find those worth reading or sharing. Admittedly, the feed search part of Google Reader is also a really useful feature too.

Faster RSS feed reading

Google Reader - List View

So with all of those reasons above, you can tell I like Google Reader. But particularly with reason #2, you can end up with literally hundreds of articles to read. I’ve discovered that the List View tab (v.s. the Expanded View tab) allows you to see the headlines for all your RSS feeds at once. If something sounds interesting, just click on an article headline to see the expanded view.

Google Reader - Expanded Version

Now this might seem obvious to you, but you will be able to read almost a whole page full of headlines in a few seconds this way, compared to having to repeatedly page down in the expanded view. If you can skim-read (and many hardened internet users can), you save a great deal of time skipping over the dull stories. Once you’ve found the ones you like, click on the Mark All As Read button. Then wait for the feeds to update for your next instalment!

As I said, not rocket science, but a great time saver. It personally helps me to save spending lots of time at the PC due to my RSI limitations. I firmly believe there’s too much information floating around, and not all of it is important.