5 Top uses for Google Reader

Google Reader is (in my opinion) a much under-used and under-valued Google app. Until I discovered it I didn’t use RSS feeds that much because I couldn’t find a reader that looked good, was free and easy to use. Google Reader is all three – and with some great functionality. Since I’ve started using it I’ve subscribed to about 30 blogs and every day get lots of useful content delivered straight to me. I don’t even have to leave the comfort of my iGoogle page. So here are my top 5 uses for the Google Reader..

1. Read your favourite blogs/webpages

This is Google Reader’s primary purpose.  Anytime you find a blog or webpage you think you’ll read regularly, just look for the RSS feed logo or a ‘Subscribe via RSS’ button, click it and you should (if you use IE or Firefox)  be able to import it straight into the reader. Nearly every webpage worth visiting will have an RSS feed now. And it’s not just blogs – there’s a feed for BBC News and Sport.

2. Keep up to date with company news and buzz

If you have an online company then one essential thing you need to do is visit blogsearch.google.com regularly and check out what bloggers are saying about your company (and your competitors). Type in a company name and you’ll see an RSS feed option near the bottom of the page. Click it and subscribe – and whenever anyone blogs about you, you’ll know with Google Reader. In addition, visit google.com/news and check for news stories about your company (and competitors) and again subscribe. If there’s any news, blogs, press releases – whether good or bad – you’ll know and you’ll be able to deal with it accordingly.

3. Stay up to date with your social websites

I regularly use Twitter (http://twitter.com/toastthemost) and don’t want to have to be logged into Twitter all day and keep refreshing to see what those i’m following or followers are saying. You can get this all in Google Reader. Just navigate to your Twitter home page and look for the RSS feed, or if you just want to stay up to date with a favourite Twitterer then just navigate to their page and find the RSS. Facebook also have RSS feeds for news and mini feeds.

4. Search your items

A great reason to have all this content in Google Reader rather than visiting the individual pages is that the reader has the functionality to allow you to search all (or some) of your content. Being from Google you get a huge amount of space and so no posts get deleted. That means you can search for content about whatever you like and you’ll find any posts that relate to your search. This is extremely useful if you remember a useful post that you forgot to ‘star’. If you tag your posts, or put them in well named folders you’ll be able to search within certain tags.

5. Discover new feeds, watch your trends, share and star items

Clicking the ‘Discover new feeds’ option will let you find new feeds that match fairly closely the type of things you’re already reading and is great for finding new content. ‘Trends’ doesn’t seem to have huge value (or I can’t think of any) but is nice to see which feeds you read more than others and what times of the day do you read them. Starring items is a way of marking items for looking at later – something you need to do if you end up with hundreds of posts. ‘Share’ lets you mark an item to share with any friend’s you have in your Google contacts that also use Google Reader (they will need a Google account).

If you found this useful please consider sharing, stumbling or digging it! And if you know more helpful tips, feel free to add them in the comments.