News travels fast, especially on the net. You probably use a variety of web sites to stay up to date, so let’s make this simple: if you regularly check more than one website, then a feedreader will make your life much much easier. Whenever a site you want to follow—a blog, the New York Times, or jcrew.com—publishes a new article your feedreader will download it and have it ready for your viewing at a moments notice. This is a great way to stay up-to-date, and you don’t have to worry about a bunch of notifications junking up your email-Inbox because feedreaders operate independently (though Outlook and Thunderbird have native feedreader modules). You just open your reader and skim through the headlines, much like you would a newspaper, until you find an article that looks interesting and give it a read.

Most websites offer a “feed” (nerdlets.org is no exception). Just look for this icon and click on it. That icon is the universal-symbol for a feed that you can subscribe to in your reader of choice. You may see a lot of variations on the same theme (for a whole collection, go here; any of these would be great additions to your own website).

There really is no reason for me to go on and on about this because many people already have. Here is a great introduction by TechSoup—a website devoted to technology tools for non-profits.

Reader Recommendations

Perhaps you’re ready to get started (the best introduction to a feedreader is to start using one)!

My personal favorite feedreader is Google Reader. It is a web-based reader, so you use it within a browser like IE or Firefox, but it also has offline support, so you don’t always need a web connection to stay in touch. Google reader has a wealth of viewing options. You can view your feeds as a mail-like list or as mini articles. You can group your feeds into topics, which allows you to check only the most important or interesting sites during the week, leaving the sites-I-follow-because-I’m-bored until later. You can star items you like, share them with friends (but only if you want to!), bookmark and email to your heart’s content, and if you decide to change your mind you can always export your feeds and switch to a different application. Best of all, Google Reader brings Google’s wonderful search functionality to your feeds, so if later down the road you remember an article you read but did not bookmark it, you can search away and soon you’ll be in business.

There are a whole host of other applications that might better fit your needs. I have heard good things about bloglines and newsgator, but have not used those myself. Many folks like things like Netvibes or Feedly. Both services, the former a website start page and the latter a Firefox plugin, allow you to view all your feeds in a magazine-like style, spread out across the page in columns rather than as a list. If you have a lot of feeds then this can be inefficient, but for a selection of important sites it can be helpful. Snackr is a fun little application that turns your feeds into a news ticker, and it can also integrate with Google reader. You can also use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Thunderbird as readers, but personally I like to keep me feeds away from my emails.

Conclusions

A feedreader is a great way to get information. What are your favorite feedreaders? What are you looking for in a feedreader?