Twenty years ago, the average American would sit down to a cup of coffee in the morning and read their favorite newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or perhaps a local newspaper.  If you wanted to find out how your out of state relatives were doing, you’d sit down and write them a personal letter.  If you wanted to keep up on your favorite organization such as various Christian missions or other charitable groups, you’d subscribe to their ink on paper newsletter.

Today, all of this is changing, thanks to blogging, and the entire, difficult-to-define set of technologies dubbed “Web 2.0″.  Now you can visit the various blogs being published by the Wall Street Journal, your local paper, your distant relatives, and the various organizations that pique your interest.  But, the time required to “serf” the web (mis-spelling intentional) to all those individual websites is prohibitive.

Enter Google Reader, a web-based blog and RSS feed reader.  If you have a gmail account, you just sign in and add the rss feeds from all your favorite blogs and news sources such as http://joshchamp.wordpress.com/feed  You can even add it to your personalized homepage along with your email at www.google.com/ig.  This allows you to quickly glance at your newest emails and all the updates to your favorite blogs on one page.  I use it personally and have found it very intuitive and easy to use.

Of course, if you don’t use Gmail, there are other feed readers, also known as feed aggregators, that do the same thing:

• Blog Lines
• News Gator
• Rocket RSS

So how do you read the news?  Feel free to comment.

Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Josh Champagne
Filed under: Computers & Technical, Product Reviews