As everyone knows, we’re in the information age. Or the digital age. Or Web 2.0. Or 3.0. Whatever you call it, there’s a lot of information out there. This information can help you monitor industry trends, business news and much more. However, for many of us, it would be easy to argue that there’s too much – too much to effectively keep track of, at any rate. Sometimes, there may be a particular web page (or several) that you’re interested in. This page may be updated anywhere from once a month to several times a day. Or even an hour. You can check it constantly, but you may miss something. Or, if it isn’t updated very often, you’re spending time looking for changes that aren’t there.
Here’s where a product from Google can help. As you probably know, Google is much more than a search engine. There’s Google Maps, Google News, Google+, etc. etc. etc. One extremely useful tool is Google Reader. Google Reader enables you to keep track of updates to web pages you’re interested in, all with one easy-to-use tool. Google Reader isn’t new – it has been available for a few years – but it’s still one of the most useful tools out there if you have lots of web content to monitor. Or even a little.
You can access Google Reader using your Google/Gmail account. Once signed in, just choose ‘Reader’ to get started. Click on the red ‘subscribe’ button and add the URLs of the sites you’re interested in. As your sites are updated with new content, Reader will show you updates to your sites so you can monitor everything from one place. It’s that simple!
Reader works best with sites that have RSS (Really Simple Syndication), but if the site you’re watching doesn’t have it, you can use a service like Page2RSS. Page2 lets you get a feed from any page, whether it has RSS or not. Simply enter the URL into Page2. It will create a URL for you to enter into Google Reader and voila, you can see when the page is updated.
Here’s a video explaining Google Reader in plain English. And here’s a second video on Page 2 RSS.
