20+ Awesome & Unique Uses Of Google Reader You Probably Didn’t Know

Google Reader, a tool which can do wonders, is still unused by people. We all know Google Reader as a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline, but it can also perform various other useful tasks. I compiled some uses of Google Reader and mentioned the links for tutorials.

#1 – Online Archive : Not many of us know that Google Reader can also be used as a powerful system to archive your favourite RSS feed data. This is really useful since you may want to access them in the future. Using Google Reader you can :

• Archive Your Twitter Tweets.
• Archive the RSS Feed of Your Blog Content.
• Archive Your To-Do List.

Anything that has an RSS feed can be backed up and archived with Google Reader for access long after the feed is gone.

Tutorial : Use Google Reader As An Online Archive

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#2 – Bookmarking Service : Google Reader will be really useful for minimalists. It is can also act as a wonderful bookmarking service. You can also import bookmarks from other services like Delicious. You can also search all your bookmarked items.

Another useful feature is, you can add notes when you’re bookmarking items to remind you why you liked it in the first place. You can keep as many bookmarks as possible.

Tutorial : MakeUseOf

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#3 – Track Your Blog Comments : This web-based aggregator can also be used for marketing and tracking your blog comments effectively. You can see per blog how many articles you have commented on and the timeline of your comments. You can easily track :

• Articles commented on per blog
• Articles commented on per day
• Revisit articles commented on recently

Tutorial : Be An Original

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#4 – PR Monitoring Tool : PR professionals can make of Google Reader to do much of their job–looking for opportunities, identifying and connect with media, and monitoring and managing crises. You can use Google Reader to :

• Finding Journalist and Media.
• Tracking the Experts and Influencers.
• Monitoring Searches.
• Reporting and Analyzing Trends.

By filling Google Reader with feeds your important media targets can make it suitable for PR monitoring easily. [Check Tutorial]

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#5 – Stream Your Own MP3s : You can use Google Reader Audio Player to play mp3’s and embed it on your website or blog. This method makes use of IFRAMES.

All you need to do is paste the following code into your site:

<iframe style=”border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); width:400px; height: 27px;” id=”musicPlayer” src=”http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=XXXXX”> </iframe>

In the above code, just replace XXXXX with the Audiourl, like this,

https://hellboundbloggers.com/hbb-podcast.mp3. Then the code becomes:

<iframe style=”border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); width:400px; height: 27px;” id=”musicPlayer” src=”http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=https://hellboundbloggers.com/hbb-podcast.mp3″> </iframe>

Source : EDU’S WORTHLESS BLOG

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#6 – Ultimate SEO Tool : SEO is something which every webmaster and blogger worries about. You can make use of Google Reader as an SEO tool to monitor your industry, competitors, and their backlinks. The main SEO resources you will be monitoring are :

• Competitor’s keywords (brand and product keywords)
• New pages on a Competitors site
• Industry keywords
• Forums (find people asking questions about your industries products / services)
• Competitors backlinks (mainly new backlinks)

Tutorial : Quick Online Tips

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#7 – Journalism : Google Reader can also act as a powerful journalism tool. RSS feeds and feed readers can allow journalists to easily monitor a lot of disparate news sources. It’s much easier to use a tool like Google Reader to monitor information on the Web than it is to use Web browser bookmarks or to manually typing in URLs.

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#8 – Share on Social Networks : This video explains how to use Google Reader to share on social networks.

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#9 – Awesome Private Database : http://www.steverubel.com/screencast-google-reader-isnt-just-for-news-i?c=1

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#10 – Create RSS Feed Of Any Site : If you want to track websites but they don’t have a RSS Feed URL, then Google Reader will help you like a charm.

Google Reader has a new feature which will facilitate you to create RSS feed of any website. Just go to your google reader and click on Add a subscription button. Now enter the webpage URL you want to track and click the button ‘Create a feed’. Simple.

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#11 – Track Page Changes : If you are rarely visit Google’s homepage, generating a feed for google.com or for other international Google homepages is a great way to track all the doodles and the promotional messages.

Source : Google System

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#12 – Translate Language : Google Reader has also has Google Translate integrated into it.

Subscribe a feed in some foreign language and under feed settings check “Translate into my Language”.

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#13 – Find RSS Subscribers : You can also use Google Reader to get the no. of RSS feed subscribers approximately.

These numbers are however approximate as they only include the RSS subscriber base of Google Reader, iGoogle and Google Desktop users as determined by Google FeedFetcher.

Source : Digital Inspiration

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#14 – Send Blog Posts To Evernote : Google Reader lets you send blog posts directly into Evernote. When you send a post to Evernote, we go out to the source page and clip the whole thing –that way you get everything, not just the bit that you see in Reader.

You will get the content you want and some of the webpage elements.

Source : Evernote Blogcast

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#15 – Convert Partial Feeds Into Full-text Articles : Many of the blogs in the blogosphere truncates its full feed into partial one. The main reason for this is to save their blog content from feed scrapers and plagiarism.

You can convert those partial feeds into full feeds easily using two things.

• Greasemonkey Firefox Addon.
• Google Reader Preview Enhanced userscript.

Tutorial : Guiding Tech

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#16 – Create & Share Feed Bundles : If your friend wants to know which are the technology feeds you follow. He also wants to quickly subscribe to those feeds in his feed reader. How do you do it? Simple, just create and share the feed bundles easily using Google Reader. Just follow these simple instructions to create a feed bundle.

• Click on “Browse your stuff” in your Reader interface.
• Click on “Create a bundle” button which is present at the right hand side.
• To share your bundle with your friends check the “Add to my share items” box. Click “Save” button.
• Click on “Email to your friends” link to immediately email it to your multiple friends.

Tutorial : Guiding Tech

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#17 – Save Time On Craigslist : Using Google Reader you can plan purchases On Craigslist Without The Craigslist Hassle.

It’s a huge time saver and helps you get exactly the data you need in one centralized place. You can see all of the ads from your craigslist search right in your RSS reader and as new ads show-up, they will appear in your reader.

Tutorial : GroovyPost

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#18 – Download Articles As PDF : By using Google Reader’s custom link feature you can also directly download articles from Google Reader to your computer in PDF format. Here’s the procedure for doing it.

• Go to Google Reader “Settings” page.
• Click the “Create a custom link” at the bottom.
• Fill the following information in the Name, URL and Icon URL field.

  > Name: Save as PDF

  > URL: http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL-${url}

  > Icon URL: http://www.adobe.com/lib/com.adobe/template/icon/pdf.gif

• Now Save as PDF checkbox will appear above “create a custom link”.

Now you can download and enjoy the articles in PDF Formats.

Tutorial : Guiding Tech

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#19 – Check Your Reading Habits : Using Google Reader’s Trends Feature you can get to know your reading habits.

Subscription trends shows you tabs of the feeds that are most frequently updated, inactive and most obscure, meaning the ones the fewest people subscribe to.

Tutorial : Social Media Explorer

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#20 – Purge Old Feeds : Using Google Reader API you can purge old feeds. If you often import the OPML that other people publish (of their favorite feeds) so I can improve my feeds list. For example, somebody recently published OPML of around 75 Silverlight feeds.

Well, I sucked that one right in! Now the problem is that I’ve accumulated close to 3,000 feeds and as you might guess, Reader has really started to slow down. So, what to do? If only I had a way to unsubscribe from all my feeds that say, hadn’t had a new post in X number of months. Well, KTHXBYE, I CAN HAS API! It’s the Google Reader API to the rescue!

Tutorial : EggHeadCafe

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#21 – Print Articles Without All The Clutter : You can now add Print Friendly to print the articles you want without all the clutter easily. This one is similar to the ‘Download Articles as PDF’ tip. Simply replace the custom link as show below.

Add the following information to the fields.

• Name: PrintFriendly
• URL: http://www.printfriendly.com/print/n?url=%24{url}
• Icon URL: http://cdn.printfriendly.com/pf-icon.gif

Tutorial : Print Friendly Blog

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#22 – Create A Mobile Site : Google Readers generates a simple and clean look of your website or blog. You don’t even need Google Account to get this. All you need is your blog’s Feed URL.

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/Feed_Address

Just add your blog’s Feed URL instead of ‘Feed_Address’.

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/feed://www.hellboundbloggers.com/feed

where feed://www.hellboundbloggers.com/feed is the Feed Address of our Blog.

Source : HellBound Bloggers (us :P)

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#22 – Track LinkedIn Answers :

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#23 – Play .MP4 Files :

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You can also help us to update this list, if you know any other useful tip kindly share them in the comments below.