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 BLOG | JANUARY, 2008 Taking the plunge - Part 3 - Google Reader January 22, 2008 at 8:15 pmby Mark As I mentioned in my last post, I received great advice from Chris that in order to blog well, you had to read great blogs. That makes good sense, but how do you find great blogs, keep up with them and keep track of the new ones that are sprouting up every day. It turns out, it's easy - with a little help from your friends. Google Reader, to me, makes web2.0 possible for me. When hearing about people that kept up with many tens of blogs that each had tens of posts a day, I always wondered - how do they find this stuff? There are other questions that pop up after that one is answered (of which you'll see a few below), but for me, finding it was the first mystery. I started with seeing what my peers were doing. Google Reader let's you not only easily peruse the blogs you want to keep up with, it lets you see what blogs your friends are reading and which ones they have specifically designated as share-worthy. Starting with Chris and Eric's blogs, I quickly spidered off and found others that I am interested in. Here is an excerpt from a Google chat between Chris and me last night: 9:47 PM me: how many blogs are you subscribed to? Christopher: 71 9:48 PM me: omg HOW?!?!?!?!?! that is so depressing ugh 9:49 PM Christopher: why depressing? 9:50 PM me: I have like 20 and there are endless blogs to read Christopher: hah yeah, but remember, one of the key things is knowing how to skim well and, you have to grow into it gradually i've been using rss for years now and constantly pruning my subscription list 9:51 PM subscribing, unsubscribing, etc. so it takes a while me: ok Christopher:
whats more important now is that you get to know the kinds of blogs you
like, and why, and which ones are important for you to read me: yeah Christopher: for example, though he's all huge and what not, I've decided that Scoble is not really an important one for me to read 9:52 PM so I gave him the cobra a while back 9:55 PM me: I added him today 9:56 PM I'm adding a bunch and will then prune out Christopher: that's the way to go As you can see, Chris (and Eric) are excellent resources. In summary, Google Reader is a great blog aggregator. There are many out there, but I find it to be too good to continue shopping.  |
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By the way, for readers that don't know, 'gave him the cobra' means, 'fired him.' This phrase entered the Newfangled lexicon after Donald Trump made the cobra-like gesture famous when 'firing' candidates from his show, 'The Apprentice.'