Friday Favorites 12.07.07

Welcome to another edition of Friday Favorites! Just a quick update on my BIG surprise, it’s not quite ready yet so I’ll need a bit more time to pull it all together. It’s worth the wait.

This is such a hard time of the year to stay motivated and on track. I’ve noticed that so many people who blogged daily don't seem to be blogging as much anymore. How do I know this? Because I was so busy last week, I didn't have time to read blogs and when I finally got a chance to read the blogs, I had over 150 posts to catch up on. I’m sure you’re thinking WOW that’s a lot of posts, well actually it isn’t. In the six or seven days that I didn’t have time to read, a few months ago, there would have been 400 or more posts.

So my Friday Favorite today that I’m going to share with you is Google Reader. If you aren’t using a reader service like google reader to keep up with all of your blogs and favorite sites, now is a great time to get organized and get started.

Take a tour HERE and learn all about Google Reader. You simply sign up and then paste the URL for each blog into reader as a new subscription. Once you add all of your favorite blogs, you simply go in and read their updates and respond to their posts. It also shows you trends. You can click on the INACTIVE tab and see who hasn’t been blogging, sometimes you might know they are away on vacation but if you suspect they are struggling, it’s a good opportunity to pop over to their blog and post a few words of encouragement.

Here’s what it says on the welcome page:

• Stay up to date Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content.
• Share with your friends Use Google Reader's built-in public page to easily share interesting items with your friends and family.
• Use it anywhere, for free Google Reader is totally free and works in most modern browsers, without any software to install.

NOTE: I am in no way compensated for talking about Google Reader, I just like to share things I've found that make my life easier.

Its just so convenient to just go to one site and see all of your blogs and which ones have updates rather than logging on to each blog page to check for new posts, let Google Reader do it for you! It also makes recommendations based on the types of blogs you like and your geographical location…not that I have much time for that because I’m so busy keeping up with all of you!!

I’m still fairly new to blogging and I’m sure there are lots of great tools out there to use in conjunction with blogging. If you have a favorite, I’d love to hear about them!