• Automate routine, multi-step tasks with new guided Actions that can be shared with coworkers.
• Change how users interact with content and its context with PDF Portfolios using new layouts, visual themes and color palettes.
• Microsoft SharePoint integration. Check-in, check-out PDF files for reviewing and editing shared documents.
• A streamlined process for large organizations to deploy, configure and manage updates and conform to ISO standards, including support for Microsoft SCCM and SCUP.
• Updated user interface: Display the most commonly used tools all in one pane.

Reader X will introduce support for PDF documents that contain a much wider range of content types, including drawings, email messages, spreadsheets, videos and other multimedia elements. It also has new collaboration features: Users can make notes and share feedback by marking up PDF documents using the Sticky Notes and Highlighter tools. Other new features in Reader will include:

• Choose reading mode to fit more content on the screen, or two-up mode to view page spreads.
• Directly access online services at Acrobat.com from within Reader X. Perform common tasks such as creating PDF files, securely sharing and storing documents and screen sharing.
• Availability on additional mobile platforms, with support added for Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Acrobat X is available to pre-order now; Reader X will be made available for download next month.

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Learn Keyboard Shortcuts

You can blast through your feeds with a few simple keyboard shortcuts that allow you to quickly move around without slowing down to reach for the mouse or the touchpad. It also seems that some features don’t really have a click-able counterpart, so the only way to access them is through the keyboard shortcuts. You can get a list of the available keyboard shortcuts from the Google Reader help page, but here are a few of my personal favorites that I use most frequently:

• ? – get a list of keyboard shortcuts
• j – move to the next item in the feed
• k – move to the previous item in the feed
• <space> – page down
• <enter> – open or close an item
• v – view original post
• r – refresh feed

Go Full screen

For really serious reading, you’ll want to go into full screen mode and use all of your available screen real estate for reading feeds. In full screen mode, you get a simple window showing the current feed with no additional clutter. You can navigate using the navigation shortcuts above, in addition to some shortcuts that are specific to using full screen mode:

• f – enter or exit full screen mode
• <shift>+u – show pop-up navigation menu to change feeds

Ditch the Home Page

While the home page has some interesting things like tip of the day and recently read items, if your goal is to maximize your productivity and efficiency, you should set your landing page to something else. I have all of my most important feeds in a single folder named “Critical” and I start there. You can change your start page by going to Settings -> Reader settings -> Preferences -> Start page, and select from any folder that you have created, or from a selection of other pages (All items, Starred items, etc.)

Group and Prioritize

I make extensive use of folders as a way to group and prioritize my feeds. They have become even easier to use after the recent addition of the rename folder functionality. The feeds that are most important located at the top of my navigation window. The order of the folders denotes their importance to me, but this shifts around a bit depending on my current projects. I simply drag the folders around within the subscriptions navigation pane to reorder them.

I also group things into folders based on projects or context. For example, I usually put my work-related feeds into a couple of folders grouped by topic that I can easily get through without being distracted by personal items. Keep in mind that you can also click on a folder and navigate through all of the posts within that folder across all of the feeds, so you can get through the folder more quickly than if you are navigating the individual feeds. As a result, I sometimes put critical feeds in multiple folders (critical folder and project folder) so that I can glance at it when I land on my start page of critical feeds or when I’m browsing through the project folder. Reading an item in one folder also marks it as read in any other folder, so you don’t have to worry about duplication.

Use Trends

The trends page is surprisingly interesting and useful. You can find it in the left-hand navigation pane, or with this shortcut combination: g then <shift>+t. While you can get some interesting insights into which feeds you really read, when you read them and what you clicked, the real value is in pruning your feeds. Take a look at the frequently-updated feeds section of the subscription trends; these are the high volume feeds in your reader. Now, which ones do you really still read and which ones have the zero percent read rating? You can unsubscribe from the dead weight by clicking the conveniently-located trash can, and it won’t take you long at all to reduce the clutter.

What are your favorite tips for using Google Reader?

Reactions to Google’s new social networking tool, Buzz, appear to be divided between those who think it will topple Facebook and those who have already discounted it.

If you still haven’t made up your mind yet about Buzz, here are some useful tips for customizing and automating the service so that it can work with your other social networks. We’ll also look at some ways to share messages and links via Buzz with specific groups, which could make it a useful tool for the workplace.

The Importance of Your Google Profile

Even though Google Buzz works inside your Gmail account, your Google Profile also plays a role in managing the information you share on Buzz. What’s that? You didn’t know you had a Google Profile? Well, if you use any kind of Google account then chances are that you already have one.

To see if you do and what it looks like, go to the Google Profile page and click the “View Profile” button to log in. If you already have a profile, then you can customize it via the “Edit Profile” option. You can add many of your other social networks and RSS feeds. Notice the “Buzz” tab. Also, you can actually edit the URL for your Google Profile and create a vanity URL; mine is http://www.google.com/profiles/ThePaisano. Just bear in mind that you can only do this one time. Simon provided some more information on Google Profile here.

Sharing Stuff with Google Reader

If you use Google Reader then whatever you share there shows up in your Google Buzz stream. It’s all done via the  ”Shared items” feature. Look for it under “Your stuff” in Google Reader.

You can share anything you’re viewing in Google Reader by clicking the “Share” button at the bottom of every post you’re reading. (Click “Unshare” to stop sharing it)

You can set privacy controls and only allow specified groups of people to view the items you share. This could be important for those of you that are using Buzz for work.

1. Go to Google Reader
2. Click on “Shared items”
3. Click on “Sharing Settings”
4. Change the setting for “Your shared items can be viewed by” to: “Protected (Shared with Selected Groups)”

You can manage your groups via Gmail’s Contacts. Note that selecting the “Public” option means just that: Everyone is be able to see everything you share via Google Reader and Buzz.

Buzz Browser Add-ons and Extensions

You can access Buzz via some new browser add-ons and extensions:

Buzz It! is a Firefox add-on that allows you to share anything you’re viewing by adding a button to your Firefox toolbar that launches the Google Reader sharing window. The install process is a little convoluted, and I don’t like the way it opens new tabs instead of using pop-up windows.

The Chrome Buzz extension for Chrome is good if you just want to view what’s happening in your Buzz stream. It does not provide any ways to share items or even post messages there.

By far, my favorite way to share items on Buzz is through Google Reader’s Shared Items “Note in  Reader” bookmarklet. To set it up, just go to Google Reader, click on “Shared Items” and drag the “Note in Reader” button (located on the far right-hand side) to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. I’ve tested this in Firefox and Chrome and it works really well.

Whenever you’re reading something online and want to share it, just click the “Note in Reader” button. A window pops up with all of the details filled out; you can also add a note. Make sure the “Add to shared items” checkbox is selected, hit “Post Item” and the page is shared via your Buzz account.

Connecting Buzz to Twitter via Google Reader Shared Items

If you’re sharing links via Buzz you’ll probably want to share them with your Twitter followers, too. You can do that in a few different ways.

Twitterfeed lets send anything you share on Google Reader to your Twitter account. Just go to your Google Reader Shared Items page, copy the Atom feed and paste it into Twitterfeed. Then just authorize your Twitter account to sync them up.

Facebook’s FriendFeed can also connect Google Reader to Twitter very easily. Just click “add/edit” on your Friendfeed profile and look for the Google Reader service under “News.”

Reader2Twitter is my favorite method of synchronizing Google Reader/Buzz with Twitter because it uses the pubsubhubbub protocol to perform real-time sync. A new version has already been released that works specifically with Google Buzz. Just sign in here with your Twitter account via Oauth. You can even add your bit.ly account so you can shorten URLs and track analytics. All in all, it’s a simple but powerful little tool.

Share your favorite Buzz tips below.

Once installed, the Snackr user interface is nothing more than a plus sign where you add feeds; an icon for options including manually adding and removing feeds and changing feed preferences such as the ticker speed and placement; an icon to expand or collapse your ticker, and an X to quit the app. Tiny, compact, virtually unobtrusive.

The great thing about this tool is that I am getting my RSS feeds in a way that feels much more consumable to me. I can dive in at any time and read up on the latest articles and posts to keep me on top of my game as a Web worker.

The ticker, however, while placed “out of the way” is not so unobtrusive.

No matter where I place the Snackr ticker and no matter how slowly I set it, the darn thing just keeps going and going and going and going. For me, it becomes distracting as my eyes jump to the moving titles and images.

Maybe over time, I’ll get used to it. But I find myself collapsing it after a minute because it is subliminally sending my brain into a frenzy. The ticker is probably much less pushy on a larger monitor. On my MacBook, the ticker is hugging the bottom of my browser window so it is hard to not notice.

Also, I’d really like a Pause button so I can have a dozen article and post titles across the bottom of my screen for a while that I can pick through at my leisure instead of feeling like I’m missing something.

Set up is easy (thank goodness).

Go to your feed reader and look for an export feature to make an OPML file. I use Google Reader so I clicked on “Settings,” then “Import/Export,” and finally “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file.” The file was created very quickly.

Then Click on the tiny Options icon, click Import, and voila!

So how does Snackr compare to Newsfire, the OS X little feed reader app that Mike Gunderloy wrote about in March? Well, when I went to test out Newsfire, I couldn’t figure out how to import the OPML file that I had exported from Google Reader. Whatever Google Reader spit out was not compatible with Newsfire, so I couldn’t do a comparison.

I like my apps to work with minimal struggle on my part so despite the lack of a pause button on Snackr, I am actually enjoying it in little, tiny bites.

(P.S. Just got a tweet from the Snackr folks: “Planning to add some less-distracting animation options, like fading in new items instead of the continuous scroll.”)

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That said, I am so glad that I took the time to seek out a demo of Filtrbox. As someone who is a major consumer of information from the Web as part of my Web work, Filtrbox is going to be my new best friend. Initially, I misunderstood its purpose and saw it as another feed reader. But with some hand-holding from the company, I realize that their term “media monitor” truly is a better fit. And I’d add “little miracle worker” and “fire hose diffuser” to the description.

At its most basic, Filtrbox let’s you create filters and filter groups to parse online information based on keywords. The filtering process involves ranking algorithms that you can dial up or dial down based on the level of noise you want to keep out.

The rankings consider:

1. Popularity and credibility of the site or blog where the information was published.

2. Contextual relevance, for example, how many times and how high up in the article or post your keywords appear.

3. Smart attention to how you interact with the data you receive via your filters such as which articles you star and which ones you “x.” And if you keep reading certain types of articles, rank scoring increases for that domain on that particular topic.

At your Filtrbox dashboard, you have two sliders – Filtr Rank and Show days. With Filtr Rank, articles and posts are ranked from 1-10, with 10 being most relevant in every possible way based on the input you’ve given. You can increase the filtering by rank or decrease by simply moving the slider, and you can watch the results from your features appear or disappear depending on the direction you go. In seconds, you can watch the noise disappear and can end up with only the highest ranking articles if you don’t have time to go through a lot at any given time.

With Show days, you can decide how old or new you want the articles and blog posts to be in the filter results. If you only want to read the last day’s worth, slide the slider to one. With the free version of Filtrbox, you get up to 5 Filtrs and 15 days of history for a single user. I know in my industry, often reading something more than two weeks old can be a detriment when I’m looking for the absolute latest on any given event, technology or news.

You can also change the way your filter results are sorted and presented to you. You can Sort by Rank, Title, Date, By Filter or by the ones you have Flagged. You can review results as a list which requires more scrolling but with this view you can star and flag articles, “x” or delete them if they are totally irrelevant, and share them by email (it took me a while before I recognized their email envelope icon as an envelope – one of those little intuitive issues). You can also view your results in a data grid to see ranking, flags, title, corresponding filter name and date at a quick glance.

You can filter your articles by Sources which include mainstream, blogosphere, twitter and friendfeed. Adding twitter and/or friendfeed greatly increases your results, thus increasing the noise, but knowing what is being said in the most immediate ways via popular microblogs can be very useful when looking for the latest trends.

After making your filter groups and filters, you can turn each one on and off to vary the way information is sliced and diced and delivered to you. To start, I made three groups with a number of filters in each one:

• Social Media
  • plurk
  • social media

• Vanity Search
  • Aliza Sherman
  • Cybergrrl Oh

• Virtual Worlds
  • google lively
  • second life
  • kaneva
  • there.com

Besides an Articles view, you can view your information through the Analyze feature and see how the mentions of topics for each filter you’ve created ranks against other topics you’ve selected. While this is much more than I need to know on a regular basis about the data I filter and consume, I can see using this if I were filtering for a client and wanted to see which campaign or project generated the most online ink. Or when looking to explain to a client how much more popular Second Life is right now as compared to Kaneva or There.com, I could check the rankings to get a snapshot.

For Web publishers and bloggers, you can also embed a Filtrbox widget into your site or blog and provide your filtered news feed as additional content on your site.

According to the company, the purpose of Filtrbox is to drill down, analyze and control the noise. Now that I have a firmer grip on the many ways the company’s application does this, I’m impressed. The application offers two premium levels: Pro provides 25 filters and 45 days of history for a single user for $20/month or $200/year. Team provides 100 filters, 1 year of history, and up to 6 users for $100/month or $1000/year.

At the moment, I’m happy with the free version, but that doesn’t mean I may not upgrade soon. My only worry is that at some point, if I have too many filters, I’ll end up having to filter my filters and then filter the filters that filter my filters. Until that time, I can just let out a nice big sigh of relief as Filtrbox gives me control over the clatter of information noise and helps me to consume more quality stuff.

Disclosure: Filtrbox is backed by True Ventures, also an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the parent company of this blog.

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