What are Feeds and why do I care?

Well let me start off with what I like to call the PUSH vs PULL wars. In the beginning, there was email.

We log onto our email client and hit Send/Receive or we go to our email web client and check to see if we have new messages. (PULL)

Then someone has the great idea to schedule the Send/Receive and a little later, to create a Black Berry. (PUSH) Everybody loves the push until they starting getting over a hundred messages a day and all the sudden the push becomes a little overwhelming because batching is no longer possible and you are no longer effective because you can't do anything but be interrupted by new mail.

Different people have different needs and for me personally PULL wins here because I deal with a large amount of email and require a fairly high level of attention in order to do my job.

Enter Blogs. Blogs are these great therapeutic outlets for social commentary, professional interest, howto's and god knows what else. The problem with blogs though is sometimes the blog will post several times a day and sometimes the writer posts every couple months. You can't be expected to go to the all the sites that you read every day looking for new content. So next thing you know you have mailing list (PUSH). Of course the last thing we need is another email. So this is a horrible solution.

In order to stay up on all most current entries of all your blogs you should use a Reader. There are several out there but I'm save you the time of testing them all out yourself. I choose a web based Reader so that my "read" marks will follow me as well as all my subscriptions. Also I have no need for yet another pop up when something new arrives. I'm perfectly fine with reading things when I want to read them.

So without furthur ado. Here is how you use Google Reader

Video on how to use Google Reader (I'm too lazy to do my own at the moment)

Go here to create a google reader account (if you already have a google/gmail account you'll simply need to login).

Practice by adding my blog. I'll be following up with many post on software and technology that I think everyone should use and take advantage of.