Note: My Shared Google Reader page can be found at my personal Google Reader account.
I have a love-hate relationship with Google Reader and RSS feeds that has continued for at least four years. It is a very powerful tool that has allowed me to keep up with a variety of topics that informs my daily and professional life as a technology librarian. By subscribing to numerous websites, I can quickly keep up with my favorite tech sites (Lifehacker, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb), librarian bloggers (Unquiet Librarian, Librarian in Black, iLibrarian), EdTech folk (Free Technology for Teachers, MindShift, and Edutopia), and inspirational sites (Heart of Innovation, TED blog, and Daniel Pink). You can follow journals, news sites, magazines, and many other types of sites as well.
You can share what you’re reading to your public shared items page, email items to people, and if you turn on the feature, you can quickly share to several different social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and Instapaper. I heavily use these features.
It is very easy to get quickly overwhelmed by sites that post a lot or when you don’t check Google Reader every day. Also, if you take advantage of following people’s shared Google Reader pages, their shared links come into the stream as well, overwhelming you further. I tend to come in and mark everything as read occasionally, and that’s okay.
Even with the ease of being overwhelmed, Google Reader and RSS are still very powerful tools. They can help you quickly canvas many sites at once at a glance on a wealth of topics. Simply following sites in your research, teaching, or interest area will help you gain a better grasp on your subjects. Using RSS in the classroom, can better inform lessons using timely links. Students could create their own accounts and pages, following topics they’re interested in. The sites you can follow can include news sites, specific news searches, databases on search topics, RSS’s potential is nearly limitless if sites have deployed its technology.
Even with my love-hate relationship with Google Reader and RSS over more than four years, I still find it to be quite valuable. If anything it’s more powerful than ever. I just need to continue to learn the value of marking everything as read, and constantly re-evaluating what I’m subscribed to and weed the sites as needed.