What has changed your life?

You all know that God has changed my life more than anyone or anything.  For the purposes of this post, I am speaking on a much more insignificant level.

Google Reader (or any other Reader) has changed my life.

For a an excellent simple video explanation of RSS and Google Reader, watch this video on YouTube.

So much of today’s content online is made available via RSS or ATOM.  The idea is that you can get a site’s content automatically shown in your Reader when new content is available.  News comes to you instead of you going to the news!

I have posted about this before, but I must post again because it truly has changed the way I work and play on the web.  If you don’t use it, you should.

For awhile, I avoided it because I didn’t really get it.  Now I get it, and can’t believe people avoid it.

All you have to do is either click on the RSS button of syndicated web content, or copy the URL and paste it into your reader, to subscribe.

What have I subscribed to and therefore read in one location?  Many News sources Headlines (CNN, FoxNews, NJ andLocal NewsPapers), many blogs from all walks of life, sports scores and headlines, my church announcements, photofeeds feeds (flickr, picasaweb), Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, store sales and specials, etc.  All of this on one page!   

Benefits? 

Huge time savings. One location to go to to read content from many many sources.  I don’t waste my time going to a ton of sites and waiting for them to load (with all the peripheral images, ads, links) sometimes only to find out new content has not been posted.  I can browse the content from 100 websites in a fraction of the time it would take a “non-reader” surfer.

Education and awareness.  I am almost always aware of the latest happenings in the world.  It isn’t common for someone else to be aware of something happening in the world when I haven’t at least read a little about it.  I get to read from a much wider sampling from our world than I used to.

Get Google Reader here.

Rob