Thing 7: Google Reader Rocks My World

Tonight, I fell in love...with Google reader.  It's awesome.  I love it so much I want to marry it.

That might be just a little over the top, but not much.  When I think of the time I can save by not navigating to each page individually, I get very excited thinking about how I'll use those extra minutes of my day (that might sound glib, but I really don't mean it to be).  Perhaps focusing on those minutes isn't the real way to show the value here.  Like the Blogger dashboard, it allows me to see who's updated recently (to save me the trouble of checking each page only to be disappointed), but at the same time it gives me the headlines from sites I can count on being updated.  All my news coming to me at the same time and in the same place that I can follow friends' blogs and work sites...heaven.  I resisted the urge to add (yet) the fun sites I check frequently - a healthy dose of shame precludes me from naming all the gossip sites I lurk - but after 23 Things is over, I think they'll be there too.

And Google Reader Play?  What a treat.  Such goodies there.  Did you see the happy meal?  Gross.

Obviously, the personal benefits are fabulous, but yes, I'm excited about the professional ones too.  I already subscribed to my ning, for example.  I'm wondering how I could use this with students though - how cool would it be to set up a home page like this that I could share with students?  So they could check out the updates that most interested them?  Hmmm... how to make that work...

I was surprised to see that some others in the project were underwhelmed by Google reader.  I think they're either nuts - no offense, of course - or just not people who surf as many sites as I do regularly.  Because to people who do a lot of searching, like me, it's crazy cool.