Blogging and Google Reader

 

Since I know my dear mother and father read this diligently, as do other members of my loyal family, I thought it might be helpful to provide a little bit of information about blogging and other technology tips.  I know this is probably the first blog some of you (hi mom) ever read, so I thought it might be helpful to provide some context.  Perhaps some of you will decide to take up blogging yourself!  Or maybe this will just peak your interest in reading blogs and inspire you to search for more reading material that interests you.

Credit goes to my colleague, Jay L., who writes an internal e-mail blog for our company.  Below is content from his blog.  In the first excerpt, Jay is discussing ways to prepare yourself to be a good blogger.  Here is one of his tips:

“Be a more efficient reader. You can’t write if you don’t read, and whether you read business or psychology blogs, professional journals, news publications, or all of the above, staying informed will only help you, and that’s true beyond blogging. One way to be a more efficient reader is to use an aggregator. I use Google Reader, but there are a number of options out there. An aggregator is essentially a dashboard that looks like a web-based email program, and it feeds the latest posts and articles from any blog or news source that you subscribe to – these free subscriptions are sometimes called RSS feeds or Really Simple Syndication. With this system, by the time I’ve had my morning coffee, I’ve read the headlines and summary paragraphs for every new article at the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Technorati, the Onion, and the Post-Dispatch, plus I’ll see any new posts from a dozen or so blogs that I follow. For any content that strikes my interest, I click to read the full article. The advantage of this system is time – it eliminates the need to jump from website to website, and new content comes to you in an easy-to-manage format.”

Another quote from Jay, about the nature of blogging:

“Blogging is all about finding a rhythm, a format for communication that you can repeat over time.”

By the way, there are several ways to follow a blog (which allows you to see new posts as they appear on the blog).  If you click on the Subscribe page (link at the top of my blog), you’ll find places to subscribe in a reader (e.g., Google Reader) or subscribe via e-mail. You can also choose to Follow with Google Friend Connect (on the right side of my main page). 

How many of you are new to reading blogs?

How many of you do not use Google Reader yet?