What is RSS?
An RSS Reader is a simple and easy way to read your favorite news site or blogs. Instead of going out to these site to read the most recent stories or posts, the newest stuff comes to you, all in one simple page. Even more convenient is having a Reader which is online, reaching it from any place in the world.

In my eyes Google Reader is one of the best online RSS Readers on the web. For the first time user, just getting used to the whole RSS thing, this post will talk about: a) How to subscribe to a feed b) view your feeds c) the cool features built into Google Reader and d) just some nifty little tricks you can use while you’re at it. Remember, being a master of your RSS feeds is also a very important way to build up and maintain powerful social media accounts

The first thing you would have to do, is head over to reader.google.com and sign up for a free account. From there, you would want to start building up your subscriptions.

Subscribing to some of your favorite RSS feeds is simple (here’s 10e20’s feed for example). All you need to do, is go to the blog you want to subscribe to and find the little (or big) RSS button on that page. From there, you will have to Copy that URL, and then in Google Reader you just need to click ‘add subscription’ and paste that URL there. From now on, whenever that site is updates you’ll be able to see the most recent post right inside of (the online) Google Reader. This obviously saves people tons of time when they’re reading over numerous sites daily.

Now that you’re setup with all of your favorite sites, its time to look at what Google Reader is really capable of.

“Tagging” different subscriptions is a simple way to filter out only the sites you want and don’t want to read at any given time. Tagging all your sites having to do with Apple, is a great way to see only the Apple news and keep everything else separated from it. The more tags you have, the easier it is to find what you want to read about. You also have the ability to tag a subscription with more than one tag, if it falls under more than one category.

“Starring” different post is also a key feature in Google Reader. Maybe you want to come back to that post at a later time or you want to show it to a friend. You can then see all the item you starred in the tab called “starred”.

Google Gears is built into Google Reader. What this means, is that you can still view your feeds even after you disconnect from your Internet connection. You can read the latest 2,000 feeds Google downloaded, the last time you were connected to the Internet. This is a really cool feature because you still have the ability to catch up on your feeds even if you’re on an airplane (or a place where there is no Wi-Fi.)

“Expanded view and list view” are two different ways you can read your feeds. If you are going to read all the stories in a subscription at once, I would recommend the expanded view, which shows the entire articles. If you are just going to pick and choose what you are going to read the list view would be the best, having the ability to just glance at each title.

“Trends.” There is a tab in Google Reader called ‘”Trends.” That’s where you go to see the amount of stories you read in a day, week or month and compare which days you read the most. You can also see which of your feeds are the most active and which are the least active. I try and check my most inactive feeds regularly and see which ones I should unsubscribe to and which ones no new content is coming from.

“Sharing” different posts in Google Reader a great way to keep your friends updated on the stories you are reading. Each Google Reader user has their own public page with all of their shared stories, which anyone can look at and read.

Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use in Google Reader to become a little bit more productive and faster at reading your subscriptions.

• j – item down
• k – item up
• s – star
• t – tag
  
• r – refresh
• m- mark as read/unread
• shift+s – share
• shift+a – mark all as read

One last thought about Google Reader, is that there is about a 30 minute delay, between when the post was submitted on the site/blog and when it shows up in your Google Reader. So for the guys who love their breaking news and post it right away to social news websites… this may be your one drawback. If you need immediate updates a tool like Rasasa which pushes RSS directly to your IM might be the way to go.

But, overall, Google Reader is one of the simplest (but still feature filled) online RSS Readers out there and is totally recommended for the average user who just wants to efficiently check their news sites and blogs on a daily basis.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the 10e20 RSS Feed!

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