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Make Google Reader Your Web Brain in 3 Simple Steps

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Make Google Reader Your Web Brain in 3 Simple Steps

via Smithereens by Daniel Smith on 6/4/08

This makes my third post on this still-young blog about dealing with information overload on the web (and yes, I do realize the irony of that statement.) But in this day of countless blogs and news sites, combined with a daily barrage of email and countless social networks to keep up (not to mention micro-information overload from the likes of Twitter and Friendfeed), I think this is an issue many people struggle with. And hey, I just want to help.

So this post is going to show you how to handle the constant barrage of web-prose with poise and grace by using Google Reader as your personal web brain for filtering what you should read and capturing what you may want to reference later on.

There are certainly other ways of accomplishing this goal: Steve Pavlina at the popular blog Micro Persuasion prefers to use Gmail as his "nerve centre", for example, while Linden over at Linden's Pensieve prefers Diigo for capturing the best of the web, and many of Lifehacker's commenters recently weighed in with different options for bookmarking interesting content online as well.

But Google Reader works really well for me, so while I encourage you to explore those other links, this post is will concentrate on my own 3-step method of finding and filtering the steady flow of information using this powerful service.

Step 1- Get Google Reader

First thing's first, if you want to use Google Reader as your online brain, well, you need to go here and open an account if you don't already have one (dont worry, it's easy.)

If you already have a Gmail account (or any other Google service), all you need to do is sign in. If you don't have Gmail, sign up for a Google Account and you'll be able to use Reader AND also get access to the best online email service as a bonus ("One million reasons why you should be using Gmail" is another post for another day, but I urge you to give it a try too if you haven't already.)

I'm not one to reinvent the wheel, so I won't go into great detail about exactly how Reader works because Abraham over on Piper's blog gives a great step-by-step rundown of what the heck RSS is and how to use Google Reader, complete with screen-shots. [I came across his tutorial linked on SEO Diva's site, which is packed with helpful hints on running marketing your website. See my point in Step 2 about finding good content by reading good bloggers.]

So now that you have set up your Reader and subscribed to a few interesting feeds to get yourself started (including mine, right?), you will now be faced with the dilemma of where to find more piping hot and fresh content that you actually want to read, so you can have it automatically pushed to your new "story inbox" all the time - no more slagging through website after website to find stuff worth reading.

And that brings us to step 2.

Step 2- Find Stuff to Read Worth Reading

One of the main obstacles to overcome when trying to filter the web, especially if you are new to the blogosphere (and even if you're not), is figuring out where to find good, fresh content about topics that interest you.

Well it just so happens that Google Reader can be a great help in this department as well, in a few different ways.

The first thing you should do is check out it's baked-in recommendations tools.

Leveraging Reader's Recommended Blogs and Pre-packaged Blog Bundles

There is a link right in the Reader sidebar called "Discover." When you click on this option, you will be presented with two tabs, one called Recommendations and one called Browse, both of which can be helpful. Let's take a quick look at each of these.

When you're first starting out, the Recommendations tab won't give you anything (yet), because Reader doesn't feel he really knows you well enough to be giving blog recommendations on the first date. He's a gentleman like that. So we'll come back to this one.

Under Browse, on the other hand, you can really dig in right from the get-go and get started by adding some of Reader's so-called Bundles of feeds on topics you find interesting. So go ahead, flip over to Reader and add a few of these to get started- read through them, then come back and we'll continue. I'll wait right here and polish up the next Step a bit while you're gone...

Oh, you're back? Wow, I started to think you might never return. You must have found some really interesting stuff over there. See, what did I tell you?

Well, now that you're back, you're probably wondering how else you can find quality content on the internet using Google Reader. For starters, in case it wasn't obvious from my statement a couple paragraphs ago, the Recommendations tab in Reader can be a great tool for finding new stuff, but only once you've trained it a bit to recognize your tastes. So make sure to check that out in a couple weeks. (You won't be disappointed, I promise.)

Let Other Blog Readers Do The Dirty Work

Another great feature of Reader is its Shared Items function, which I will explore at greater length in Step 3 below. But to explain it most basically, this function allows us readers to click a little Share button at the bottom of posts we like and store them all in a personalized feed of our favourite items.

And thanks to this neat feature, a simple and great way to discover new content can be to skim the Favourites Feeds of people whose tastes you trust. If you trust mine, for example (a risky proposition indeed), you can follow my Google Reader Shared Items here, or take a look at the widget over there on the right-hand side of this blog (scroll down almost all the way) to see my ten most recently shared items.

But what if you don't trust anybody's tastes, and instead just want to know what blog posts the general Reader community are finding popular as a whole? Well if you're really that cynical (I kid), there is good news: you can find that information all in one place, too.

Playing off the notion that the stuff a lot of people favourite is probably pretty good, a website called RSSMeme has created quite a resource, a resource that combines all the most popular items on all Shared Items feeds for all users of Reader, in order to cull out the most popular ones for your reading pleasure. So if you're looking for solid material, this is a great site that leverages Google Reader's built-in functions to create a great content discovery tool - make sure to check it out.

Let Your Blogging Circle Grow Naturally Outwards

Finally, Google Reader can help you find interesting content in a more roundabout way: by encouraging you to read blogs in the first place. Because the best advice I can possibly give for finding quality blogs, based on my own experience, is to find a couple bloggers you like to read (one down, one to go...), and grow your circle outward from there. The best bloggers believe that the web is meant for collaboration and they will gladly link to other posts they find interesting on a regular basis (See Seth Godin's great post about this here.)

That means that by following a few good bloggers, your network of good info sources should grow exponentially in no time just by checking out the links they provide for you on a regular basis. I know my own "content network" has grown immensely in this way.

So now that your Reader is chock full of interesting writing that you just can't wait to bite into every day, how are you supposed to actually remember or act on any of the articles you like, what with so much content to consume. You can't very well memorize the URL of every cool blog post and web site you come across, right?

Well maybe you can't, but the good news is: Reader can.

Step 3 - Using Reader to Capture and Remember the Posts and Sites You Really Like

With that useful little Share button I mentioned earlier (pictured in the screenshot at left), you can file away any blog post from a feed that you subscribe to right in Reader with a simple click. It doesn't get any easier than that - read it, like it, share it.

And with that one action, you've captured the post in your very own Shared feed that is easily Searchable from within Reader. You can keep this feed private, or choose to publish it publicly like I do, so others can see what you've shared, too.

But what about stuff you choose to read on the actual web sites (not within Reader)? Maybe you've subscribed to a feed that only broadcasts partial posts and forces you to click through to read the full thing. Or maybe you've stumbled across a cool video on Youtube, or some other piece of content outside of Reader. How can you capture and file that information as well without having to have two separate online "filing cabinets"? I'm glad you asked, let me tell you how you can now combine the two.

Google Reader Share It Now As The Internet Bookmark of the Future (No, For Real This Time)

Most web users are familiar with the term Internet Bookmarks and I'm sure you are, too. When you find a site you like and want to return to later, just click 'Add Bookmark' and voila, it's saved in that handy drop-down menu in your browser. Nice and easy, right?

Well, the only problem with this traditional method of remembering sites you enjoy is that your bookmarks folder is like the electronic equivalent of a pack-rat's attic: the more stuff you shove into it, the harder it is to find anything useful.

Because of that issue, when the whole Web 2.0 craze began, one of the first types of social services to arise was that of "social bookmarking", formed around the idea that bookmarks are much more useful if they are saved online where you can find them from any computer at any time with a simple search, and share them with other users at the same time.

One of the pioneers in this space was a company called del.icio.us (which you can now reach at the less cryptic delicious.com address too), a no-frills service (now owned by Yahoo) that promised to revolutionize bookmarking by making it extremely simple and useful.

You see, to use delicious, all you have to do is a) learn what a bookmarklet is, b) install it in your browser (well, actually it works better in the Firefox browser, so make that c) download Firefox first, and then install the bookmarklet, then d) go to your favourite site and e) click the bookmarklet.) Next, when a window pops up just f) enter a title, g) a description, and h) some tags, and then i) click save and j) voila, your site has been filed away and will be easily retrieved with k) a simple search, which you can either do from the Delicious homepage, if you happen to be there, or from another Firefox browser extension... which you'll have to l) install first. It's all very simple!

If you're thinking 'That is the most complicated paragraph I have ever read in my life!', you are not alone.

Personally, I did like the idea of having my favourite sites available on the web from any location, and easily sharable, so I did give delicious a spin awhile ago, but I just found the bookmarking process itself so cumbersome (see above) that I dreaded using it (which kind of defeats the purpose.)

Many other services have sprung up that try to improve on the Delicious idea (like Linden's darling Diigo, for example, which I found useful and much better than delicious, but better suited for more in-depth annotation and research), and I might have tried a few other alternatives (there are way too many) to see how they compared as well, except that my perfect online bookmarking service snuck up and bit me from somewhere I didn't expect it to - from right within my beloved Google Reader!

How Google Reader Became My Ultimate Web Brain

As I've explained, Google Reader has, for quite some time, included that button on all their posts that allowed users to add the post to a special feed called My Shared Items. Since I do almost all of my web reading via RSS now, Reader is a permanent fixture on tab two of my browser and so this simple function was almost acting as a pseudo-bookmarking service for me for quite awhile.

But when I wanted to save a page on a blog I didn't subscribe to, or that didn't have a feed, or if I wanted to save something like a Youtube video, for the longest time there was no way to bookmark those types of content using Google Reader, so I had actually reverted to using plain old Firefox bookmarks again for those types of content.

That all changed on May 6 of this year, when Google announced Shared Items With Notes and provided a way to add items to your feed outside of Reader.

While this new feature did involve installing a Bookmarklet (which I realize I just poked fun at mere paragraphs ago), it is as simple as opening your Shared Feed in Reader and dragging a button from the window up onto your Bookmark bar. Presto.

And unlike Delicious, adding new items with this plugin is not a pain - you simply highlight a portion of the page you want to clip (if any), click the Bookmarklet and up pops a slick box that asks if you want to add a note. If you do, add one. If you don't, click save. Done - you've added the page to the same feed that tracks all your favourite posts in Reader!

Even better, it is now fully searchable within the Reader interface, like having your own efficient, personal Google Search Engine just for your bookmarks.

In Sum

I have been using this system for about a month now and it has worked incredibly well for me. I am always finding new great content, reading it with ease and bookmarking the gems. I haven't once gotten lazy and just bookmarked something in Firefox like I used to when delicious was my socialmarking service du jour (unless you count the bookmarking I had to do in order to aggregate all the entries to Copyblogger's Twitlist contest.)

And more importantly, on several occasions, when trying to pull up a page I wanted to re-read or link to on this blog, I just switched over to Google Reader quickly, punched in a search and bam: I had the page in front of me in seconds.

So if you have a photographic memory and can record every useful site or article you read in your own superhuman memory bank for future reference, then this guide probably didn't help you much.

But if, like the rest of us, you could use a little supplementary web brain power, why don't you give this system a try and let us know how you make out in the comments. Think you've got a better process for finding, reading and bookmarking content? Then please enlighten us about that in the comments, too.

By the way, if you found this post useful, it would be great if you would give it a Digg by clicking the button below - this will help others on the 'net to find my article and when they, in turn, also find it useful, they'll Digg it again, and so on and so forth, the circle of life continues. Thanks.

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I want to apologize for my absence from the blog for the past two days - certain personal circumstances have prevented me from spending any amount of time here, and any time I did spend was on finishing this post. However, the rhythm of posts should be regular again going forward. Thanks for sticking it out.

Also, a big welcome to all the new readers who've come here from links across the web over the past week. I hope to make you laugh, cry, and feel various other emotions on an almost-daily basis.

By the way, as promised, a new contest will be launched here tonight at 7pm EST, based in part on the Copyblogger TwitLit competition that I have blogged about here recently.

What will the competition be about? Well aside from the obvious fact that it will involve Twitter, I will give you another small hint - consider what day it is today... Hope to see you back here tonight!

[Update: The contest is now live here.]

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Smithereens using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

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