Feed Icons and Feed Readers
When you spend countless hours blogging and monitoring your RSS feeds for fresh new content, you can lose sight of the fact that many people still do not know what RSS feeds are.
I even find certain bloggers that bury their subscription feed somewhere towards the bottom of their homepage. Once found it is often a simple link with no eye-catching graphic to draw the eye and a subsequent mouse click.
For education on what RSS is, and encouragement and ease for people to subscribe, incorporate a Feed Icon in to your blog. Feed Icons sums it up best.
As far as RSS Aggregators go, check out Google Reader. I’ve used a few different ones, but so far I like this one the best. I really like the fact that I can view all the content, including photos and video, right there in the view pane. The “Mark all as Read” feature saves me considerable time, and I can manage my subscriptions depending on what I am looking, what I feel like reading, and what I read the most. One thing I would really like though is if Google would add the ability to comment right in the Reader.
Also, if you are using things like Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Search it just makes sense to keep it all organized into one account.
Finally, because Google just recently bought Feedburner, I am sure we will see some cool new features coming out of that acquisition. Hopefully one of the first things will be Feed stats within the analytics reporting.
June 6th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I might look at that. I’ve been using the Sage plugin for firefox, but I have to add the feeds to each system I use. The good thing about it is that it has a search feature that looks for the feed so you don’t have to find it and copy the link. It has an import/exprt feature, but I haven’t tried that yet.
-M
June 15th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I used to use Google reader just because it was also my home page so it made everything very simple, but then i found:
http://www.itsmynews.com. I like them a lot better, i think the user interface is very simple and they have a lot of feeds. The other thing i like about them is they keep adding new cool features all the time, just last week they added this site of the day thing where everyday you put up a new cool site.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
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