Google Reader: I Read the Blogs Today, Oh Boy!

I find that the print newsletters I receive in my mail tend to pile up in my work office or home office, unread.  I can't quickly search through them to find something of interest, and I have no easy way to forward interesting tidbits on to other people.  (Do people even tear out articles and give them to colleagues anymore?)

Instead, I keep up professionally by reading blogs.  Nearly all newsworthy librarian-related items will show up in at least 1 or more of the blogs I follow.  But I would never have time to visit each of those many blogs just to see if there is something new.  I need a feed aggregator (online service or app) to keep up with multiple blogs.  (Would you believe that I keep up with between 450 and 500 blogs?  It's doable.)

I have long used Google Reader.  As I already use Gmail every day, it's easy to switch over to Google Reader to see what is new in the blogs I'm subscribed to.  About 75 of those blogs are related to librarianship.  Another 50 or so are about education, and 100 are about technology.  (That constitutes about half of the total number of blogs I follow.  The remainder are related to hobbies.) 

Once you have a Google account, setting up Google Reader is a snap.  In fact, you normally wouldn't have to start with Google Reader itself.  Instead, when I come across a new blog of interest (new to me, anyhow), I click on its subscribe icon (whether it's a link or a rectangle marked "RSS" or the standard square orange RSS icon or some other subscription indicator).  I'm usually offered the option to use Google Reader for my subscription. 

Sooner or later you're going to end up with at least a few dozen subscriptions, and so you'll probably want to organize them into folders.  That makes it possible to read only work-related topics during work time and save the personal topics for other times.  You can put a particular blog into more than one folder at the same time (say, a blog about academic librarianship could go in both "libraries" and "education").

I frequently "prune" my subscriptions by unsubscribing to blogs that aren't being frequently maintained.  This makes it easier to manage and see what blogs you're really reading.  Google Reader provides a "Trends" menu choice that lets you then list which blogs are most inactive.

I also use Google Reader's recommendation feature on a regular basis to discover new blogs (or rediscover older blogs that have become active again). 

You can always use the built-in search facility to re-locate items you've previously seen, and I also use the email feature to send myself an item that I might want to save for later (or convert into a to-do), and this also makes it easier to share it with my colleagues. 

If you're not reading blogs about librarianship to keep up effectively with the profession, how else do you manage it?  (Leave us a comment!)