Home Page Syndication Service

Since I already had a Google email account I was interested in trying out Google Reader as my syndication service. I found the process of subscribing to various web pages and blogs as easy as cut and pasting a URL into a Google Reader open field box. I quickly added all of my classmate’s blog sites into my reader and find it fun and interesting to keep up with other’s postings.

I really like how Google reader lets me read the first line of each entry without actually opening any of them. This allows me to more selectively open entries that capture my attention based on the first sentence. I also subscribed to many other sites such as the Anchorage Daily News, blogs of friends, and various sports commentators. I quickly began amassing a massive amount of entries for each day the flooded my Google Reader. Needless to say, I began to see the need to categorize my resource to better manage and digest them. I found it easy to assign resources to specific folders from which I can more quickly monitor new entries and navigate to them.

I really like the concept of resources and updates being “pushed” onto my Google Reader after I subscribe to them, rather than me manually “pulling” them one by one after visiting each web site. I can definitely see how using a syndication service would save huge amounts of time when reading and monitoring even a few web sites. I also found it interesting at the variety of sites that offer syndication. I expected blogs to offer this ability, and even news sites, but was somewhat surprised to be able to syndicate several sports commentators that I enjoy reading from.

There are also many features of Google Reader that I really appreciated.
1. Google Reader automatically found any Gmail friends I had that also used Google Reader and shared resources. I found it fun to see what my friends subscribe to and share in their Readers.
2. My Google Reader “Home” page automatically presents the most updated postings from any site that I have subscribed to.
3. Google Reader also contains a “Trends” page in which one can view the percentages of each subscription that you have actually read. You can also view statistics on how many postings each subscription posts per day. One can also view their own reading habits by seeing the time of day and days of the week that they are most active on Google Reader.

Overall, I am really impressed with Google Reader and anticipate using it consistently in the future to better manage time spent reading online resources.