Under a Sea of Blogs

Too many blogs, too many blogs, like the ancient Mariner might say: blogs, blogs everywhere but not a drop to drink.

Managing the sea of blogs which engulf us is hard.

How do we separate out the good from the bad and keep track of interesting articles without spending hours in front of a browser?

I have tried several solutions, using Firefox, none of which are perfect:

selectively grouped together blogs that I like and read regularly, against those that I try to read almost daily, compared with those I rarely read but are amusing, although updated too infrequently.

Still that was time consuming and slow.

I think I might have found a better solution: Google Reader

Google reader aggregates the feeds from blogs and treats them very much like e-mails, so it shows you a selection of updated articles without the necessity of flicking through endless Firefox bookmarks (or IE’s favourites).

Google reader is another Google service which is accessed via a Google e-mail account.

The hardest part (and is not that hard) is to add the blogs that you like, here’s one way to do it

1. bring up Google reader, in a browser window
2. in a separate window bring up your bookmarks
3. select the bookmark that you want and do a right click and copy
4. returned to the Google reader page and click on “Add subscription”
5. paste into the “Add subscription” sub-window the link to the blog (e.g. http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/index.php)
6. Google will work out the rest and add it to the lower left side sub-window
7. if that doesn't work, look for a RSS or XML widget on the web page, click on “Add subscription” and paste into the “Add subscription” sub-window
8. essentially Google scans the web page for any possible feed and will try to retrieve it (most web pages have RSS feeds, just look for the funny widgets or email the webmaster and ask)
9. once you've added a selection of blogs to Google reader they will appear in the right-hand main sub-window.
10. Each time you login, it will show you the latest updates to the blogs, so less much hassle.
11. That’s it

Any problems just read the help pages

I thoroughly recommend it.