DISQUS

louisgray.com: louisgray.com: 10 Ways to Maximize Your Google Reader Link Blog

  • ontarioemperor · 11 months ago
    While I share in Google Reader, I've taken a slightly different tack to this.

    Because I get impatient with the time it takes to load a Google Reader Shared Items list that has even as few as 20 entries, I tend to delete items out of my Google Reader Shared Items list (and thus the linkblog) after a couple of days. Therefore, FriendFeed has become my official repository for all of my Google Reader Shared Items.

    The benefit of this is that FriendFeed, unlike a Google Reader link blog, allows comments on the items.

    The disadvantage is that my Google Reader statistics for shared (and starred) items are completely unreliable.
  • Louis Gray · 11 months ago
    Interesting that you say it takes too long to load. I've seen slowness for items that have Flash and embedded video, etc. And using FriendFeed as the central repository is just fine in my book, though I don't agree re: deleting.

    As for comments, if Google let you post comments on items within Reader, it's likely the blogosphere would erupt - much more than they ever did for Shyftr.
  • chacha102 · 11 months ago
    You can share things with a note, and someone pointed out to me that if you share something with a note, and someone else shares it back with a note, you two notes will stay there, creating a FF-like comment system, but still a bit frusturating
  • Rutger Blom · 11 months ago
    Great article. I love Google Reader and I think Shared Items is a powerful feature. You can find mine here http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12388509884....
  • sidharth · 11 months ago
    Well its important to share. I read lot of stories from friendfeed that are shared by other readers. Helps you to see stories from different and smaller blogs which otherwise you may never visit
  • Alif Rachmawadi · 11 months ago
    I have been using google reader, it's extremely useful service for me. One feature that I am waiting for Google reader is comments synchronization. So I can read post comments and participate using only google reader (like FriendFeed do using Disqus). I think it would be awesome.
    Thanks for your great post and your google reader shared items, here is mine http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16495325031...
  • Rob Williams · 11 months ago
    How I use gReader share has evolved over time. I didn't like the long URL so I set up a redirect at http://share.orangejack.com to make it easy. I used to use it as a manual lifestream by subbing to all of my social profiles (delicious, digg, etc) in RSS. Then I'd manually share what I wanted to add thus keeping some items just to myself (not quite since you can go to the service itself and see them), but my share blog was clean with what I wanted to share.

    Now I rely on FriendFeed to just aggregate everything automatically. It's just easier and more comprehensive. So I've stopped manually adding external services to my gReader blog and instead keep it clean with just shared blog posts and let FriendFeed sort them out with everything else.

    One thing I've realized now that I allow FF to manage my lifestream (http://orangejack.com/lifestream), it gives the title only and often it's out of context. So I'm trying to make it a habit if I share something in gReader and the title isn't a good one, I share with a comment so it has context on my lifestream. Unfortunately, the owner of the post I share doesn't get the comment unless they are subbed to me or I go back and double-post my comment.
  • Silvia · 11 months ago
    Great post Louis. At MasterNewmedia we call this activity newsmastering which involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences. We do not use Google Reader but MySyndicaat instead which give us greater flexibility.
    You can see this very post on our selection today in the international edition http://www.masternewmedia.org/index.html and in our Latino edition in Spanish as well: http://www.masternewmedia.org/es/
  • Rex Hammock · 11 months ago
    Thanks, Louis. Lots of good ideas. I've become more of a G-Reader sharer lately -- it has replaced much of what I used to do using Delicious. I think of it primarily as something that flows into FF and, thus, onto a sidebar widget on my blog. However, one feature of Delicious I miss is the daily post. Has anyone found or hacked a means to automate that -- a once-a-day blog post that lists all the items one has 'gr-shared' during the previous 24 hours?
  • davisseal · 11 months ago
  • kosmar · 11 months ago
    awesome recommendations, thanks.
  • Hutch Carpenter · 11 months ago
    Good post Louis. Spurred me to add the Atom feed of my G Reader shares to my blog.
  • Consiliera · 11 months ago
    Thanks for the ideas, I also love sharing interesting articles from Google Reader but only thought of the Friendfeeders until now. I didn't think of embedding the links in my blog or Socialmedian and didn't even know Readburner. By the way, the link to your Socialmedian page doesn't seem to be right, I think you've got to remove the /home from the end (it always leads to the users own page this way and I think you wouldn't notice it when logged in as - well - yourself). Here's my shared items page: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/08844795953...
  • wfpman · 11 months ago
    You forgot one. Take your Google Reader shared items blog's rss feed and put it through twitterfeed....
  • Tim G · 11 months ago
    Hi Louis

    I share from reader but in a slightly different way to what you described.

    I make topic specific bundles, like this one for "data viz":

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/DataReadingViaTimG

    Method:

    Step 1: Create a folder and share it publicly.

    Step 2: If a feed has consistently relevant items, just add it to the folder. All posts from that feed are included in the bundle.

    Step 3: If a feed sometimes has relevant items, leave it out of the folder, and just tag the relevant items with the folder name. Then those selected items are included in the bundle too.

    If you wanted to divide your shared items into separate feeds by topic, you could use just step 3 to do it.

    Cheers,
    Tim
  • Kol Tregaskes · 11 months ago
    Great article, Louis. Very useful, I've put my shared items in Feedheads and RSSmeme (ReadBurner next when it's working again). Are you saying that you can import your GR shared items automatically into socialmedian?
  • preor · 6 months ago
    Google Reader Shared Items