On their own, Google’s Personalized Home Page and Google’s Reader are nothing too special.  The personalized homepage is much like my.yahoo.com, protopage, live.com or any other single page that aggregates feeds.  You can subscribe to a feed by RSS URL or by searching their directory and the feed is displayed on your home page with the latest 1 - 9 headlines based off your preferences.

Google’s Reader, on the other hand, lets you subscribe to feeds and view them by site or aggregated a la a newsgator.com or rojo.com.  You can tag feeds with different labels (Google’s term for tags) and all view an aggregated feed by this label.  So for example, you can subscribe to Micro Persuasion, Seth Godin and Horse Power and label them all Marketing.  When you click on the Marketing label in Reader, it shows these three blogs posts in a single feed.

Now here is the powerful part.  Google’s Personalized Home Page has a widget that allows you to view your Google Reader subscriptions by label.  So instead of the three blogs taking up three spots on the home page you can view all three aggregated into one spot.  Do this with a few topics and you have a page that can allow you to get huge snapshots of the parts of the blogosphere that you’re most interested in.

But wait there’s more.  When you use this Reader Widget, clicking on the headline of a post doesn’t whisk you away to that site.  Instead it opens it up nicely in a floating content box.  You can read the post and click on the next post.  After reading a post, the post is no longer bold and clicking refresh will remove it from your home page.  This combines the best parts of a RSS based home page with the best parts of an RSS news aggregator.

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 9:54 am and is filed under Blog, Geeky Stuff, RSS. 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.