Tech Tip: Using Google Reader

Would you like to be able to quickly scan headlines from a number of websites across the internet? Do you know of a handful of blogs that you'd like to easily keep track of?

Google News Reader can do this for you easily. Google news reader is a webpage run by Google where you can add the web addresses of multiple sites and then see them quickly and easily... choosing to skip the ones that don't look interesting and choosing to investigate the ones that do.

Here are some quick steps to get up and running with it...

1. You need a Google account. If you've got a gmail account then it's likely this is your Google account login. Go to the Google home page and click in the upper right hand corner on "My Account". Follow the directions to set up the account. No money or big commitment necessary.

2. Go back to your Google homepage at Google.com and click on the "more" link just above the Google search entry box. You should then see a page of all of Google's offerings. Click on "Google Labs".

3. Here you'll find another list of Google's offerings. Look for Google Reader and click on it.

4. To tell Reader to track a website or blog you'll need to click on add subscription in the left column. It is on a green background. A pop up box will open and you can enter the address of the webpage/blog. Why don't you try and enter my blog (you can delete it later if you'd like). http://padandpen.blogspot.com ...

For others I like to navigate to the sites I want to track, copy the address in my browser address bar and finally paste it into the "add subscription" popup box. If the site has some kind of rss feed (it pushes or announces it's headlines and content out to the internet) then Google Reader will pick it up and you'll see all the headlines from the website/blog.

5. You can also create folders for different categories of sites... i.e. News, Sports, Religious, Etc.

6. Lastly, I recommend that you bookmark your Google Reader page so you can easily visit it and see the headlines and lead-in content from all the sites you've told it to track.

7. There is a lot more that Google Reader will do and you can explore them in the Google Reader tutorial and help pages.

Let me know if this is a helpful guide if you've tried to follow it.