RSS readers have always seemed a bit clunky to me. That’s why I’ve just kept a group of bookmarks for my favourite sites, and just opened them all at once in Firefox to get my fix of tech news. It’s a bit cumbersome, but I’ve put up with it for a couple of years.

Google Reader has just been redesigned, and I have to say I really like the way it aggregates information. I added RSS feeds from all of my favourite sites, and it presents the information better than any other reader I’ve ever used. I came to work this morning to find that I had over 100 articles to read. I just clicked on the “All Items” link and it stacked them all in one column sorted by date. As I scrolled through them, it marked them read automatically (one of my favourite features).

If I come across a long article that I’m interested in, but just want to continue skimming the rest of the articles, I can star it and later on look at all the starred atricles at my leisure. This is great because those articles can pile up pretty quickly, and when that happens, I tend to want to just mark everything as read and start from scratch.

Now, the only real major problem I have with RSS feeds is that some sites insist on only showing you a very short snippet of the article and force you to visit the site to read the rest in hopes that you’ll click on some ad banner. The CBC is really bad for this. I wish more sites would follow Engadget’s lead and just offer the option of including ads in the feed when you request the whole article.

Anyway, I’m glad I finally found a good RSS reader. I seem to be using more and more of Google’s services these days. Hopefully they live up to their “Don’t be evil” motto.