I have half an hour to go before the next class begins. And I thought I would use this time to blog about one of the latest offerings of google. If you love browsing blogs, you are going to love it. If you are a blogger yourself, you will love it more.

The stuff that I am talking about is google reader. The refering url www.reader.google.com will direct you to the site. This basically is a feed-reader. Those who know what feeds are, must have understood the concept. And for those who don't know what feeds are, they are data formats used for serving frequently updated content on net. Talking about blogs, I as a blogger need to syndicate a web feed, and those who want to get an update as soon as I post a new blogpost need to subscribe to it. It is much more simpler than it sounds. Let me come straight away to how google reader works and why it is good.

You will need to have a gmail account to login to google reader. Once you have logged in, locate the "add subscription" button and click on it. Then all you have to do is to enter the url of the blogsite (or any other site which you think syndicates a web feed) and click on "add". Job done. You can add as many sites as you want. So what next?

Well, now the whole interface looks pretty much like your gmail inbox. You can read the posts in google reader. And later whenever you login, you will be shown any new post that has been put up on any of the sites that you subscribed to. This makes it a lot easier for you to check your favourite blogs without having to open each site separately and then later realizing that only some of them had been updated.

For those who have their own blogsites, there's one feature which they should like. It is the 'sharing' feature. You can mark any post that you have subscribed to, as 'shared'. After you have checked one or more posts on google reader as 'shared' you can generate a clip that can be put up on your own blog. The clip will display the shared items. For example, notice a gray box on the right side of the screen here on my page (Amrit's shared items). The items that you see here, were marked as 'shared' in google reader. Get the funda?

Hope this post is found useful to those who didn't know about aggregators. Aggregators? Well, that's the popular word for any feed-reader that helps you assemble n number of feeds together (what google reader essentially does). Anyways, time to catch up for class. Leave comments for me to follow up.