Google Reader has an extensive list of available shortcuts. It would take quite a bit of effort to learn how to use them all, so in this post I’m just going to share those that I use every day to make trawling through my feeds a little bit faster.

• r: Refresh view
• a: Add a new subscription
• /: Search (moves the cursor to the search box)
• j/k: Select the next item in the list. You can use this to rapidly scan through a feed.
• Space/shift-space: Page down/up, which enables you to scan through longer articles and posts easily.
• Shift-n/shift-p: Select the next/previous feed in the list of feeds.
• Shift-o: Open selected feed.
• m: Mark current item read (or unread).
• Shift-a: Mark all items in the current feed as read. This is handy when you subscribe to as many feeds as I do and are constantly confronted by over 1,000 unread items.
• v: View original. This is useful for jumping to the web site or blog the item comes from. Note that this opens the original site in a new window, which your popup blocker may disallow.

This is just a small subsection of the keyboard shortcuts available in Reader, but it’s worth taking the effort to learn them as they really do make it much faster to use, particularly if you subscribe to a large number of feeds. Handy hint: If you’re having trouble remembering the shortcuts, you can always bring up an overlay cheatsheet by hitting ? (this works in Gmail, too. Thanks to WWD reader William for the tip!)

If you’re finding keyboard shortcuts useful, be sure to check out my previous posts on shortcuts in Gmail and Tasks.

Found a useful keyboard shortcut in web app? Let us know in the comments.

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