7 cool things you need to know about Google Reader

We live in the age of information overload. There is so much great stuff to read both within the realms of our profession and in general. It's hard to keep track of all the resources.

That's where RSS feeds com into the picture. RSS readers help you keep track of hundreds of blogs and news sources with a relative simplicity. There are many options for an RSS reader if you are on a Mac and as Jim notes even the last big RSS reader went free recently.

Besides all the great desktop choices the web based Google Reader is probably the best solution for your feed reading needs. There are two main reasons for this. First, GR tracks your unread news items regardless how many devices you use. Secondly, GR has a lot of advanced social features that are not offered by any desktop reader.

Here are a few cool things you can do with GR:

Offline reading

Many prefer desktop news readers because they don't need internet connection at all times, so you can update yourself on the latest happenings while on the plane or at your grandma's farm.

You can make GR to behave like an offline app by installing Google Gears that will allow you to read cached news offline. Find the Offline link in the top right corner in your GR.

Recommendations

If you want more news, you can make GR recommend you new quality feeds based on your current selection. Find the Discover link in the left sidebar. I don't know what is the algorithm used to generate the list, but it's pretty damn spot on.

Browse and keyword search

While you're at it, check out the browse functionality in the next tab as well. It offers you preset groups of feeds or allows you search for feeds based on keywords.

Statistics

If you're a good american or just a geek like me, you will love seeing stats on the number of news items you read. It feels like an accomplishment when you realize how much articles you managed to scan through in a month and how much of it was worth starring or sharing. To access this feature click the misleading Trends link in the left sidebar.

Google Reader Blog

While we are the topic of sharing articles — did you know that Google creates a blog out of your shared items that is publicly accessible? To get the link just click the Your shared items link in the left sidebar and find the links to your blog in the right panel. You can check out my shared items blog if you want to see how it looks like. As far as I can tell, these blogs can't be found with search engines, so unless you give out this hard to guess url, you're relatively safe.

Profile

Google reader comes with a customizable profile too. It will only be visible to your friends who see your shared items both in their GR's and on the shared items blog. I suppose this profile somehow will be merged with your gmail profile and possibly even your orkut account in the future.

Prioritize

Finally a useful tip on how to prioritize among your stories. Under Settings / Subscriptions you can add tags to your news feeds. Find the most important feeds. Add a new tag Critical to them one by one. Next, under Settings / Preferences / Start page select the Critical tag as your start page. (You will need to refresh the Settings page before you can see the new tag.) This way every time you arrive to your GR you will be presented with the most important articles first, so you can be sure you won't miss anything critical in the flood of news.

If you have learned something from this article. Add creativebits to your Google Reader ;)