Google Reader

Until today, I never realized that for the past 2 years, I have been dilligently reading daily news updates from 22 different sites. These sites include major news networks such as BBC, Reuters, Channel News Asia for local news and for technology news, I follow Slashdot and Digg. I also follow news related to Apple, just because it is usually interesting and fun to read. For that, I read from MacRumors, AppleInsider as well as news released by Apple itself. Besides all of these, I also follow a few blogs, these are usually related to machine learning or natural language processing.

So how have I been able to read from so many disparate sites on a daily basis? To be honest, it is not an easy process. Just about every news website as well as blogs have an RSS news feed these days. I used Yahoo Pipes! to combine and sort all of these news feeds into a smaller number of news feeds, each focusing on a specific topic such as "Tech News", "Singapore News" and "Apple News". Finally, I use a FireFox extension called Sage that presents the piped news in a nice format on my web browser. So yes this is how I have been reading news everyday for the past 2+ years, and yes I know I am geeky.

Well this is no longer the case! Today, I stumbled upon a new Google product called Google Reader that handles everything for me so I don't have to jump through all the hoops ever again.


All I need to do is read the news. :)