feed reading
For most people much of their online time is spent visiting favorite sites, and browsing through for new updates. Often this leaves you scanning through a number of sites that haven’t changed. Or struggling to find what information is new and what you’ve read or seen already. This would be like going online to check your email and having to type in your friends’ names one at a time to see if each has sent you an email since you last checked. But emails you receive conveniently shuffle themselves into your inbox.
Feeds are like emails from websites, and a feed reader, such as Google Reader, is like an inbox for your feeds. Most web pages with frequently updated material have a feed. At the bottom of this page you can find a ‘feeds’ section. These are usually not too difficult to find on most sites. Look for an icon similar to this 
. There are also a number of key terms that can help you locate a feed. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and ATOM are the key types of feeds and usually these terms will point you to a feed that is available.
Google Reader is like any other Google application. You just need to have a Google Account to set it up. I’ll spare you the details, if you need a detailed walkthrough this video has more specifics. The main idea is you once you find the feeds you would like to ‘subscribe’ to, you copy the link which should like vaguely like the following:
http://www.somesite.org/atom.xml
http://www.othersite.com/feed.rss
Once you have the feed address click the [Add subscription] button in your Google Reader home page and paste the address into the form. Once you’ve subscribed it will initially show a number (usually 10) of recent posts. From now on when you log onto Google Reader any new posts that have been made will show up for you to read. If an article grabs your interest and you wish to view in its original context, you can always click the headline to jump directly to the story or blog.
A word of caution. Don’t go feed happy. If you fill your reader with tons of feeds you will wake up tomorrow with ten thousand stories in your inbox. Try to stick with pages you know you always check and build up your list slowly. Another help is that many sites have more specific feeds. Don’t get the CNN feed of all stories. If you’re primarily interested in business, get the business feed. Politics? the politics feed. You want to get the highest percentage of stories that will be relevant to you in your feed reader. Otherwise instead of saving time, you’ll wind up browsing through more garbage than you can manage. Don’t be afraid to remove a subscription if you find that most of the stories are not of any particular interest to you. This is going to be key in finding the right balance among the feeds that you track.
Google Reader also lets you share stories that you find interesting with friends. You can email links to the story (from your GMail account). Or there is a share button under each story. If you click this, it will show up on your shared page. You can send the link to your shared page to your friends and they can keep tabs on the stories you like. You can see a list of my shared stories here.
With the right usage, feeds can significantly decrease the time you spend online, and make you more productive. They can help take control of your internet usage so it doesn’t control you.