Thought I might share one of my favorite tools online. Its a little tool that lives within Google Reader. Google Reader? What is that you say? Okay, we shall start at the beginning.

Google Reader is a blog reader, feed reader, news reader or what some call a aggregator. Fancy terms, I know. Simply put: “it puts all the stuff in one place.” Here take a look at my news reader which is made by Google

I know its a little hard to see but on the left are all the feeds I subscribe to. When I use the term feeds I mean: blogs, picture sites, podcasts, news feeds, etc. So let me give you an example how this works and what it is all about.

Lets say everyday you get up and check 5-10 different blogs for updates, as well as Flickr for updated photos from your friends, and other sites. By subscribing to the RSS feed, you know this logo you see on sites:

It puts all the stuff right there for you in one handy dandy place! (When I say subscribe, I just mean click on it. It will prompt you with the rest.)

Now all you have to do is open your news reader and all the “updates” are there. You can see , read and SHARE (which we will get to in a minute) everything in one place. It updates it for you. You dont have to go to different sites to see if there are any new posts. Think of all the time you just saved!!!

Now for the share feature. This is the part I like.

Your reading a great post about… bacon. As you read it you think, “This is the best article about bacon I have read in a long time. Sure, wish I could share this with my friends, quickly and easily.” Well now you can.  There is a little button at the bottom. See, let me blow it up:

So you hit this little “Share” button and the item you are looking at is placed into the “shared” folder of all your friends. They can look at it when they wish, if they wish at their leisure. Now the really cool thing is it pulls from your gmail contact list to know who your friends are.  Of course your friends need to be using Google Reader and have gmail for all of this to work.

I think this “Share” fuction is a very powerful tool that just does not get a lot of buzz or respect.

Posted under Blog