The Google Reader Secret — TDC Preseason (Week 4)
Ed has been waiting to create this video since the start of the preseason. Using the trick in this, you will save at least an hour every day. For years, Ed was a Bloglines users, including professional blogger. Google Reader may not look better than Bloglines, but Google Reader’s feature is unbeatable, especially what’s going to be revealed soon.
How It was Typically Done
On the left hand side of Google Reader is the list of your subscription, you can manually ask Google to refresh (check for new content) for you, click on each of the subscriptions, one at a time, and read the headline plus snippets of the posts. Once you go through it all, you need to click on the Mark all as read button to make the posts appear as read.
With so many posts, especially if you follow a lot of RSS feeds at the same time (most pro bloggers are), you will never get through them, especially if you are on iPhone. The task can be very laborious. For this reason, Google Reader may not seem to be very impressive, but…
There is a different view of RSS feed called the All items list.
This is how it appears on the screen. Make sure sure you are in the list view. This is vital.
You need to watch the video to see how Ed went through his RSS feed subscriptions in real time. Because he got only the headlines, he could scan and scroll through the whole list of 376 new items very quickly.
If you are interested in a post, click on the headline (or blog post title) and up it pops.
Below the single expanded post, you will find a lot of useful links that allows you to mark content, share with others, share with note, email, and more.
Let’s click on the Share with note link. At first, when you do this, it won’t do much, but by the end of the preseason, it will floor you. (Hint: FriendFeed)
Just type a thing in the note field and hit the Post Item button.
This feature is very helpful because you don’t have to jump into anything. You can do just that within Google Reader without getting distracted. A post can possibly get through thousands of places just with a one press of button.
Another thing is that the list is in time order, not in feed order, which means you see all blogs equally. With Bloglines, if you focus too closely on a few feeds, you are going to miss cool things because you just don’t have the time.
With this feature, you don’t have to follow everybody in Twitter, but still get all the conversations delivered to you via RSS feed.
The possibility is limitless. RSS feed is everywhere nowadays.
When you view an item, but want to get back to it later, it is easy to check the Keep unread option and leave it at that.
If you look at a conversation, be it Twitter of Seeismic, it will open in a new browser tab, so you don’t lose your Google Reader session.
Edit tag allows you to mark the content so it is easy to search later.
When you are finished, just click on the Mark all as read and you are done.
Disqus is a blog comment service that allws you to get viral traffic. It also includes video comments too.
In the demonstration, Ed was able to go through the whole thing in literally a few minutes. Imagine this in your niche. You can be across everything you need to know. Tracking news, RSS feed and everything in the niche are now possible.
You will dominate and know about that niche than anybody else in the planet. It is like bringing a gun to a knife fight.
By now, you should be desperate in getting more feeds. So, have fun!
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