Although I’ve tried several feed readers, Google Reader is the only one I’ve used for more than a year. Not everyone will agree with my choice, but its simple and straightforward interface was probably the reason why I stayed with it for this long. But, despite its simplicity, there are many ways for the average reader to customize their Google Reader experience. Here are some examples:

Change Google Reader to Suit Your Aesthetics

Though there aren’t many visual settings you can change within Google Reader itself, there are many available skins and Firefox add-ons that can do this for you.

One of them is Better Greader by Gina Trapani. It allows you to view pages inline, which isn’t practical for netbooks but looks great on bigger monitors. It also comes with a few minimalist skins, including the stunning Helvetireader. If you’re familiar with CSS, you can take it a step further and modify Helvetireader yourself. For those who want a darker look, check out Google Redesigned. It adds a sleek dark skin to Google Calendar, Reader and Gmail.

Use Trends to Streamline Your Subscription List

Around once a month, I check out the “Trends” section of Google Reader. It’s an easy way to check the feeds that I don’t read often. I unsubscribe any feed with a reading rate below 50 percent, because this means that most of the time I don’t get much value out of that subscription.

Under the “Subscription Trends” section, you can also display the most inactive feeds, as well as the most frequently updated ones. This allows you to delete feeds from defunct blogs, or from blogs that update more often than you like.

Streamlining your subscriptions with data from Google Reader Trends can tell you a lot about your feed reading habits. This means that you’ll be evaluating subscriptions based on facts rather than the hope of “I’m sure someday I’ll get some interest/value out of this feed.”

Process Your Reading List Faster by Starring

Google Reader has a “Starred Items” feature that allows you to attach a star to important items. Instead of using this feature to have a lengthy archive of previously-read posts, you can use this it to speed up your processing time within Google Reader. Here’s how I do it:

1. I view my new reading items under “All Items,” under “Show” I select “List” by default.
2. Looking at all the listed titles, I star every item that I want to read in full. Then, I click “Mark all as read.”
3. I go to the “Starred Items” section and read each item one by one, un-starring them as I go along.

With this practice I can often finish reading my entire list in one short sitting, or I can go back and read them later when I have free time. And when I go back, I don’t have to sift through other unread items that I already processed earlier in the day.

Add the “Subscribe as You Surf” Bookmarklet.

When I use the default RSS button on Firefox to subscribe, it takes me to a page where I have to choose my feed reader, then when I choose “Google” I have to select Google Reader. To avoid these multiple steps, I use a bookmarklet to make the subscription process easier. Go to Settings > Goodies, and under “Subscribe as you surf” drag the “Subscribe…” link onto your Bookmarks toolbar.

Share Items Directly from Your Reading List

As Charlie noted earlier this year, by going to Settings > Send To, you can enable Google Reader to share selected feed items to Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and other social media sites. After doing this you’ll be able to see a “Send To” menu at the bottom of each post (see image below). This automates sharing as much as possible, although you’ll have to log in to your social media accounts if you haven’t done so already.

Know Your Keyboard Shortcuts

In my experience, navigating Google Reader tends to be faster with keyboard shortcuts. At the very least, minimizing mouse movements in general prevents your hand from getting too strained. Print out this handy keyboard shortcut list and keep it near your desk until you’ve memorized them by heart.

Do you use Google Reader? How do you customize it to suit your needs and habits?

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One of the people that I talked to at Beer and Blog was Jason Mauer, Senior Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and @jasonmauer on Twitter; he says:

“I follow Twitter for the conversation anyway, and have found it’s mostly duplicative to also follow the blog feeds of people I’m already following on Twitter. If they post something, I’ll usually hear about it in a tweet.

Where Twitter really pays off is through the power of social networking — interesting content surfaces naturally from people’s recommendations. I might not know that blogger at all who just wrote a really great post, but I’ll hear about it via retweeting. People I follow deliver content piping hot right to my desk. And unlike RSS, Twitter is two-way — the discussion is right there. I get more bang for the buck spending the precious resource that is attention on Twitter than on an RSS reader, which feels like a chore in comparison.”

Mike McClure, strategy and governance consultant and @mcclure on Twitter, says:

“I use twitter in lieu of an RSS reader for productivity and efficiency reasons. All but one of my news sites make announcements on Twitter anyway, so I don’t need to check yet another news source. If the news is big enough, it’ll be circulated enough that I’ll find out soon enough anyway. I’m an analyst not a reporter, so being first to see the news is less important to me than seeing a broad set of thoughts and opinions about the same news.

For real-time information there’s Twitter, for everything else there’s Google.”

McClure also mentioned that Twitter lists might make it even easier to use Twitter to keep up on news, since you can categorize groups of Twitter accounts to create news lists for even easier access to news feeds on Twitter.

These conversations got me thinking about how my use of RSS readers has changed. I am still an obsessive user of RSS, but the feeds that I check most often aren’t news related. I have feeds for Yahoo Pipes that track mentions of all my various projects, clients and other important information, and I regularly read feeds that have unique content that I wouldn’t otherwise find (web comics, niche blogs, online community content, etc.) However, I read my news feeds or mainstream blog feeds much less often than before. Most of the news that I would get from technology blogs has already been discussed and linked on Twitter by the time I get to it in my RSS reader, so I rarely need to read my news feeds.

The feedback on Twitter (as Twitter doesn’t store tweets indefinitely this link may not work in the future) shows that many people are replacing RSS readers with Twitter, but that doesn’t tell the entire story.

As you can see, quite a few people have reduced their use of RSS readers, but like most trends, it isn’t universal. There are plenty of people — like me — who still use RSS readers for some feeds, but there are other people who have actually increased their RSS reading as a result of Twitter. The increased usage seems to fall into two categories: People who read Twitter in their RSS reader, and people who run across new things that they then add to their RSS reader.

Has Twitter changed the way you use an RSS reader?

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No matter what you do, there are probably a certain number of sources that you follow on a regular basis, and managing that information as seamlessly as possible is very important for your productivity, and to hold onto your sanity and not feel overwhelmed.

For me, the easiest way to streamline my information processing is to organize it by context so that I know immediately how to treat the information and, more importantly, how to act on it.

I currently have five tags (or folders) for separating my subscriptions. They are:

• Alerts
• News
• Scan
• Twitter Folks
• Twitter Replies

My “Alerts” folder contains all my Google Alert subscriptions. I’m notified anytime my name, company or web sites are mentioned anywhere online. I used to subscribe to these notifications through a daily email, but eventually figured out that it was easier for me to subscribe in my feed reader so that I could tackle the information at set times, rather than when it became available.

My “News” folder obviously contains all my news feeds. By keeping these subscriptions in their own folder, I can quickly “mark all as read” anytime I get behind or feel information overload setting in, because in reality, if it’s really all that important, it will continue to be reported on in the coming days, or I’ll hear about it through another source, like family and friends or when I watch the morning news (yes, I still do that).

My “Scan” folder contains all of my blog subscriptions. There are probably about 50 blogs in there, but by keeping them separate from my news feeds, it’s much more manageable. Usually, at any given point, there are no more than 20 or so new posts in this folder (since I check my feeds at least once per day, except on the weekends), so it’s pretty easy to scan them for interesting topics. Another advantage of keeping them separate from my news feeds is that I immediately switch gears when I hit this folder. I know that the folder contains potential blog fodder, as well as highlights of what’s going on around the web, so I start paying better attention.

“Twitter Folks” contains the feeds of my few favorite Twitter folks. I still haven’t wrapped my mind around Twitter completely, so this is a way for me to dabble in it without feeling overwhelmed or confused by it. I subscribe to a small group of people (in my Google Reader, at least) and follow their updates, just as I do my regular feeds. Up to now, I haven’t been compelled to reply to anything I’ve read in this folder, but sometimes I do get a good laugh.

“Twitter Replies” contains any replies to me on Twitter. Since I don’t really go over to Twitter that often, I was having trouble keeping up with replies to me, so I fixed this by searching Twitter for @AmberSR (my handle) and then subscribing to the search query by RSS. Now, when anyone retweets something I’ve posted, I can thank them right away (rather than finding out about it well after the fact).

I’m a minimalist at heart. Five folders are all I need to keep my information in order and relevant to me. I can go through my feeds quickly, and I know exactly how to act on something, making the whole process enjoyable rather than overwhelming.

How do you organize your information so that you make the most of it and so that you stay productive and efficient?

Image from Wordle

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“They don’t want to start a blog,” one says.

“They are afraid of RSS feeds,” says another.

“They don’t even know about MySpace or Facebook,” declares yet another.

Are we all just too “into it” to remember that our clients are often way far away from it?

I’ve been lucky in the last year or so to have some clients who trust me implicitly to lead them down the right path toward enhancing and augmenting their online communications with social media tools. Others, however, dismiss it because it is just so far out of their realm that they would rather put off the discussion than try to understand the implications of a blog or a Twitter account to communicate their message. In some cases, I’ve been able to sneak in a few social media tools with positive results, however, I admit this isn’t very strategic.

Here are some things I’ve thought about or observed in terms of handling the reluctant social media client.

Factor in the education and handholding

If you have a great client you’ve been working with who is resistant to social media but willing to trust you, make sure you factor in the educational process you will have to go through to bring them to a more comfortable place. I’ve had to create special PowerPoint presentations and hold one-on-one sessions to help empower some of my clients so they can embrace a social media strategy instead of looking like a deer caught in headlights. From a business standpoint, you have to account for this additional time and effort and fold it into your consulting fees.

Take only clients who get it

As I look over the web sites of other consultants, I’m struck by how some of them flat out state that they only work with companies who understand that social media is an essential way to communicate online these days. They do say it more elegantly than “we won’t work with you if we have to convince you that our way is important and the smart way.” Quite frankly, while I could find this sort of “pre-selection” language a bit off-putting, I actually applaud them for going for the upper echelon of potential clients who already get it. That cuts out a lot of the convincing and cajoling.

Don’t push social media on everyone

Personally, I can find a good business reason for every company or nonprofit organization to have a blog or a social media presence, but there will always be a capacity issue that could kill any well-intentioned blogging effort. Many companies and nonprofits still don’t realize they can hire a pro-blogger or social media specialist to do the job. They cringe at any suggestion of an additional expense even though the expense is often quite reasonable and manageable or in the case of nonprofits, they could enlist volunteers perfectly willing to participate. If a company or organization is still struggling to get their e-newsletter off the ground, sometimes no amount of explaining that the blog and RSS feed is the “new” e-newsletter will convince them to ditch the old way for the new. Either suck it up and provide them the Web 1.0 service or refer them to someone reliable who is willing to do it for them instead.

Keep the conversation going

Just because you have a client reluctant to embrace social media doesn’t mean the conversation stops there. Keep the dialogue open. Send them links to articles and blog posts that provide further information to increase their understanding. Point them to campaigns you are conducting for other clients to demonstrate what you can do for them. Invite them to local presentations you give where you discuss social media topics. Convince them to just join one social network and then send them referrals through it to show them how powerful it can be for their business.

Just don’t give up.

How do you handle the client or potential client who is still stuck in…2005?

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I know it has only been a week, but here are my first impressions about the impact reading feeds is having on my life and work.

1. They make me look smarter. Over the past week, I used Tweetburner to immediately post what I was reading when I was reading it to my Twitter page. On those mornings that I was immersed in feeds, I think I looked smart and informed. Either that or crazy or not busy enough actually getting work done.

2. They give me interesting fodder for breakfast conversation with my husband. Unfortunately “new media” is not his area of interest so he paid me back reading me articles about bears and other wildlife topics.

3. I read more blog posts in one week by Seth Godin than I had in the last several years. I don’t mean to neglect Seth. He’s smart. I like him. I learn from him. But I stray from reading blogs in general because I can’t seem to find the time. Reading feeds over eggs and coffee carves out time to learn from the masters.

4. I learned about new paths to productivity. Tracking the feed of Brazen Careerist led me to an interesting blog post from Penelope Trunk and one that I need to read again. Productivity is my obsession. The information in her post is like giving a compulsive hand washer more soap.

5. I learned more about Twitter apps which can only increase my Twittering effective. From Twemes to Hashtags to Twidgets, I devoured this short and snappy post and still wanted more. Increasing my Tweet effectiveness is actually important to my work since I use Twitter to source story ideas, to get answers to my burning tech questions within minutes, to market projects (both mine and my clients’), and to connect with my peers on a regular basis.

6. What I read in feeds last week had either a direct connection or impact on what I do every day for work. I discovered some interesting blogs and sites such as: Brand Tags – an experiment in the 1-word associations people make with brand logos (branding is an important aspect of the work I do to market companies and nonprofits online); the post Social Media FAQ#5: How Do I Takl to my Executives About Social Media (always interested in seeing how people communicate social media to non-tech types – helpful in my pitches to potential clients); and Drop the Excuses and Start Participating (interested in the impact of social media on traditional PR as I’ve moved from the traditional to the “new PR” over the last 10 years and into social media in the last few years.)

It remains to be seen if I can keep up with my feed reading over time. In the meanwhile, I’ll absorb as much knowledge as I can to expand my understanding of this ever-changing industry and to improve what I do and how I do it.

What was the latest thing you read via your feed reader that has had an impact on the way you work?

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