Trying Out Aggregator for the First Time: Google Reader

After reading through Week 10's reading in LTC Wikipedia (http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/TyingItAllTogether), I still have a rather faint understanding of what aggregators are until I watched the attached video. The turning point statement in the video that made an impact to my understanding is that instead of going straight to our target websites to see whether anything is updated, these updates are fed directly to our 'personal search homepage sort of'.



So my first trial of aggregator is the Google Reader (www.google.com/reader), since I already have a gmail account. At the same time, I go to the URLs of my favourite websites that are constantly updated (usually websites with message boards) so that I can copy and paste the URLs later. Now, going back to my Google Reader page, I click at "Add subscription" located somewhere on the left panel of the page. Automatically, a small box will appear where it prompts me to paste the URL of my favourite website. The next step is to click the "Add" button and voila, the link will appear when you click "Refresh" (on the light blue panel). Also, the latest updates of the URLs you add will show on your Google Reader page.

The good thing about Google Reader is that you can automatically see the latest updates on those websites you are keeping track of and then decide whether the latest updates are worth a further read. In that way, you get to save time on going/clicking to that website if it turns out that the updates to that website is not of interest to you.

Also, in my opinion, the Google Reader is more like a sophisticated version of bookmarking (e.g., the "Favourites" button on the Internet Explorer) or social bookmarking (e.g. www.delicious.com). In bookmarking or social bookmarking, you only get to bookmark URLs of your favourite websites, but you can't see what are the latest additions or updates. At the end of the day, you still have to click on the bookmarked URLs to check out the latest updates. And of course, social bookmarking allows you to share the bookmark with others based on the labels that you tag the URLs with and vice-versa, plus perhaps a little note (written by the bookmarker) on what the website is all about. But Google Reader gives more advantage - besides having the bookmark function, all the updates (or 'feeds') of your bookmarked websites are shownly directly in your Google Reader page, so you don't have to waste time going to those websites if it turned out that there are no updates at all or if the updates don't concern you at all. Also, the Google Reader has the shared items function (which is exactly the function found in social bookmarking) and it allows you to decide how public you want the sharing to be.

Wow! Technology is simplifying multiples steps into just one step (or few steps!)....making complicated things simpler!