Many of us use Google Reader to read RSS feeds. It’s a tidy way to scan and archive a lot of news and it can be well organized into groups of different content. My go-to feed of the day is my ‘mobile-computing’ category (public here) and as I go through the items I tend to share ones I think I need to follow up on or that other people would be interested in. Each shared item ends up on my shared page and on an RSS feed that gets fed into the front page of UMPCPortal. I even use tags to generate specific RSS feeds for other places. I might use the tag ‘carrypad’ if I want the item to be linked with the Carrypad website for example. When you step outside Reader and get links thrown at you from email, twitter and just general browsing, you need to find another way to mark them. Either for reading later, sharing or creating an RSS feed. There’s Instapaper, Read it Later and Delicious but instead of using a separate service Google have their own called ‘note in reader’ which is a little applet that you can add to your desktop browser toolbar and it allows you to highlight any web page you want, regardless of whether it is in your feed or not. Conveniently it allows you to add a note and a tag which is just perfect for me. As I find an interesting page, I’ll note it to Google Reader and add a tag. I can’t think of a better way in which to share, annotate and route information to various sites, editors and followers (the tag-based RSS feeds can be fed into Twitter but I tend to import them into the great Lifestream plugin for WordPress.)
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