Are you a newsaholic?

I am a news ADDICT. I read magazines and newspapers whenever I can get my hands on them. Somewhere along the line, I discovered blogs, and was even more addicted. Then Google Reader came about, and lo and behold, my days were complete.

Google Reader has been around for a few years, but more and more of my friends are joining into it each day. I don't know how you RSS, but Reader is my ideal method, and I'll tell you why - I am also a Google Addict :) The new Google Buzz has yet to appear in my Gmail (how are they rolling this out? Why are not the original Gmail invite-only nerds like me getting it first?) but I am pretty sure I'll find it fun to play around with, just like Google Wave.

But Reader is so much simpler than Wave, or whatever Buzz will be (assuming its anything like Wave and takes some time to catch on). So if you haven't converted to Reader yet, let's do a brief 101, especially since Reader will be one of the things you can play with whenever you get Google Buzz.

If you have Gmail, you have a Reader account. Go here. Then sign in with your Google Account. Reader makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs, news, and other sites. To make it even easier, they have a nice tour you can take here.

What are your favorite sites to visit? Do you hit up the AJC daily? What about your favorite food blog, or your friend's blog (like mine!)? Think about all those bookmarks - that's so manual to click through each site looking for new things! It's like Facebook pre-News Feed.

Reader gives you the most recent updates without you having to go find them. I have my Reader organized into lots of categories, too, like ATL blogs, food blogs, etc. Firefox even gives you a nice little orange RSS symbol up in the web address bar, and you just click that button whenever you want to add a site to your Reader.

The social side of Reader (which seems to be the basis of this new Buzz thing) is sharing items with your friends and chatting about them through messages. All of your Google friends can see your Shared Items, and then you can see theirs! They also let you make a nice page out of Shared Items for the public, like mine here. I have this feed in a widget over on the left there, too, in case you want to check out the things I am sharing.



Add in your favorite RSS feeds to your Reader - and connect with me!