How many blogs do you read? None, you say? One or two? Just your friends? Well, fellow writer, it’s not enough. The digital age is upon us and it’s vital to your career to know what’s going on in the publishing business, your genre, who’s buying what and who’s writing what.
But I don’t have time to check everyone’s blog!
Fear not! There are tools to make this easier, especially to check on the bloggers who don’t update every day. Why waste time keying in their URL only to see there’s no new posting when Google Reader can do it for you?
What’s Google Reader?
It’s a handy tool that scans the blogs and websites you tell it to and puts it on one page. At a glance, you can tell who’s posted and who’s hasn’t. One quick and easy place to go to. All you need is a Google account (Free!) at www.google.com/reader or use gmail (www.gmail.com). On the upper left is a blue bar – Read your subscriptions. Click on it and add the URL of the blog or website you want to keep tabs on.
It’s easy to manage, too. At the very bottom, in smallish print, is another tab – manage your subscriptions. Here you can group like blogs into folders. Agents can go in one, friends who blog in another, favorite authors in a third. Google will “scrape” their addresses and dump it into the reader for the next time you log on. When done, mark it as read, star it to find it later, share it with friends, etc.
RSS Feeds
Don’t want to bother with another email account? You can do the same with a RSS feed. Have you ever noticed this icon in the address bar? By clicking on it, you can subscribe to the bog/webpage and have the latest post delivered to your email, MyYahoo, or Google account.
In preparing for this post, I counted twenty-seven blogs/websites I follow. I have them in three different accounts (Google reader/My Yahoo/another Google Reader). Plus, I don’t have a RSS icon on this website for you to follow. I guess I’d better do some organizing, huh?
And so should you.
Until Monday, take care.
Cheryl
