During a normal web surfing session, where would you think that I spend over half of my time? The answer would be Google Reader. As of this post, I have 120 subscriptions listed there. That means that if feed readers such as Google didn’t exist, that would be 120 web sites I would have to visit each and every session to keep up with the opinions, news and information that interest me. The advantage of RSS can best be described as “Gathering Vs Hunting.” Conventional methods of web surfing involve searching, clicking links and bookmarks, etc. (hunting). With RSS, you just sit back and let the content come to you (gathering.)

So, does this mean that I have to read through 120 sites x the number of articles posted to each site? Not at all. Just scroll through the headlines of each. Reader can be set up to display either full posts or just the title of each.

Expanded Titles

If set to expanded view and the article is ridiculously long, just use the “next item” button at the bottom of the page.

Next and Previous Buttons

See something that you want to save and come back to later? Just click the “star” located at the top and bottom of each item.

Star Items Button

Over time, you may find that you have accumulated many feeds covering the same general topic, but the problem is that they are spread out all over your feed list. Simple solution: just create a folder and move those feeds to that one folder. Now you can click that folder to display all the feeds in it or expand the folder to read feeds individually.

Folders

And I would like to finish with another important factor: Bandwidth. A large majority of feeds only output the text and images of the article itself, which means you won’t have wait for normal page elements to load such as colors, background images and other formatting elements, along with various scripts (flash, java, etc.)