It can be called an obsession, but reading blogs and articles is just part of blogging. You spend tons of time on the web reading what people have to say on every topic imaginable, looking for trends, news, valuable information, and posting comments and linking back to your blogs along the way. As a marketer you probably have similar habits. Read anything and everything about your market space, especially keeping tabs on comments about your company and your competition. There are a million feed readers and feed aggregators, but one of the very valuable ones is Google Reader.

With Google reader, the idea is to crank as much information as possible through the interface so you can constantly scan for relevant news stories and updates to your favorite blogs. You will find in a matter of minutes that you can gather more information from more websites than you thought possible in minutes a day, where you might not have found the time to visit them all before. In the top right corner of the UI is the option for “Expanded View” which lets you read the first paragraph and see the image associated with the post.

Are there any cons? Actually yes, there are three major cons that I have found with Google Reader.

1. You can’t post directly from the Google Reader. If you find something valuable and want to immediately comment to it or blog about it, you need Scribefire or Flock to do it.

2. It’s addictive. The idea that you can visit one place and grab all that information will cause my fellow ADD sufferers to become addicted to the Google Reader. Until you get control over your addiction, you’ll be checking it constantly…jonesing for the latest update. You can shake it, just stay focused or up the Ritalin dosage.

3. It’s steals some of the fun away from the web. I miss going to Engadget once or twice a day, and popping in on the guys at Gizmodo regularly throughout the week to spy on the latest shiny new toys. Since using my RSS Feed reader, I rarely find the need to visit the actual site.

There are a number of tools out there with varying degrees of value to bloggers and marketers. Netvibes and Pageflakes widgetize the RSS feeds, Cullect allows you to post comments directly from the reader, Twitter about an article or to blog directly from the interface, and Google provides a solid UI and is super fast. Any of these will help you get started and all of them will improve your ability to stay up to minute on all your latest feeds from Mashable, Wired, Webware, Engadget and Perezhilton. And this way, no one has to see you actually visit the Perezhilton website.

Tags: blog-tools, blogging-technology, blogging-tools, business-blog, business-blogging

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 5:59 am and is filed under Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.