Google Reader

I use an aggregator to fetch most of the fresh information I read on a daily basis: news, blogs, weather, Dilbert. An aggregator is a program that pulls different web pages you select into one window. Take a look at the Education and Tech News window on this page.

http://www.protopage.com/educ260

Those listings are updated each time you visit the page. From that one page you can see all the headlines and easily click (or right-click Open in New Window) the headlines that interest you. Anything on the web with an RSS feed (look for one of these symbols)

can be “fed” into an aggregator.

Google Reader is more than a list of links to headlines. Within GReader you can read an abstract of the article. It keeps track of those you have read and lets you mark important items so you can easily find them in the future. You can also share your items with others.

The killer feature of GReader is its connection to the Google search database. If you want to read news about “Alvin Trusty”, you type my name into the Add Subscription box of GReader. Google finds my blog and every blog I’ve linked to or posted on. Each listing has a “subscribe” link under it. You click the one(s) to which you want to subscribe. It’s just that easy.