Google Reader

There's a great new kids' music band called Google Reader, and I just listened to their debut album called Labs and it's really quite good.

Hardy har har.

Of course for some of you who have already used RSS this will not be news at all, but I just recently discovered that whole thing and how easy it is to use something like Google Reader to collectively keep up on different websites and blogs that I would otherwise have to check individually. With the free Google Reader (you'll need a G-mail account to use it), you just input the 'username' of the blog (which is the first part of the blog's web address - for this site it is cooltunesforkids), then click the Subscribe button and it should hook you right up. In addition to Blogger, you can also set it up to work for blog updates on MySpace, Live Journal and other sites, and for any website that has an RSS feed, such as news sites.

So instead of checking each of those websites and blogs individually to see if there's anything new, you just go to your Google Reader bookmark and it will show you if any of them have new content, which you can access and read directly from there. I have about 20 different blogs and websites set up through there so far and I just leave a Firefox tab with that open behind whatever else I have open. It even refreshes itself to check for changes and the tab will indicate when there are new items. Very cool!