According to Wikipedia, Google Reader is ‘a web-based aggregator’ capable of reading atom and RSS feeds.

What Google Reader does is to bring all of your favourites into one place - like an inbox for everything on the web. This means that you can go to one URL and find all of the blogs, news sites, online journals, etc that you would usually visit on a regular basis. 

It collects your subscribed-to feeds and arranges them in categories of your own making.

How you decide to organise the feeds is up to you. They can be arranged by categories such as news, design, advertising, technology, etc, or by order of importance beginning with what you feel to be most important reads, followed by less important, followed by you can read these if you have time. You will probably find, as I have, that the longer you use Reader, the more feeds you will subscribe to. This means that you will quickly accumulate new articles to the point where the quantity may become overwhelming.

Do not be afraid to use the “mark all as read” button.

When you are overwhelmed and simply cannot get through the number of articles unread in your Reader, you can simply mark them all as read. This will remove them from your unread articles section, and you can start fresh. They have not been deleted and if you discover somehow that there is an article you have missed you can select “Show All” and this will bring back all of the articles that have been previously marked as read.

Adding feeds to Reader

There are various ways of doing this. If you are on a blog site and decide to subscribe to their RSS feed, they should have an option to receive the feed via Google.

At this point you will be given two options, one of which is to add the feed to your Google homepage - iGoogle- and the second of which is Google Reader.

Select this option and when you return to your reader, you will notice the name of the blog showing in the left hand column of Reader under the title Subscriptions. If you find you are not given the option to choose Google as your RSS reader, the alternative is to copy the URL of the site you wish to subscribe to, select the “add Subscription button in your Reader, and then paste it in.

This should then bring up the subscription in the same place. Occasionally you may find that nothing will happen after you do this - if this is the case, it may mean that the site is not set up to provide RSS.

Managing your Subscriptions

Once you have added various subscriptions to your reader, you may find that they are all over the place and that you would like to categorise them. To create a new folder, Select the drop down arrow on the subscription you wish to send to a new folder and select New Folder. Give this folder a relevant name so that you will be able to recognise what might be in it at a glance.

Once you have created several different folders, these will also show up on this drop down menu and you can select one of the folders you have already created to add the feed to if there is already a relevant folder.

You may feel that one or more of the chosen subscriptions may be relevant to more than one of your folders. You may choose to add them to both folders. If you do this though it will show the number of unread items in that feed additionally for every folder you add it to.

E.g. if my feed has 167 unread items in it and I have it in two different folders, the number of unread items from that subscription will seem to be doubled.

If you find you are struggling to properly organise your feeds, you can select the drop down arrow on the right hand side of the Subscriptions column and select the Manage Subscriptions option.

Here you can check and uncheck which folders you would like which subscriptions in, all on the same page.

Once you are in this Manage Subscriptions area, you will see that there are various other tabs as well.One of these is settings where you can change the language, and various other default settings such as confirming before marking all as read.

Another tab in this section is Send To.

You will find, at the bottom of every article there is a line of options. One of these options is to Star your article, which will be explained a bit further down. Another one of these options though is Send To. In the Settings tab, you can select which websites you send things to on a regular basis, for example, Twitter, Facebook and so on.

When you have selected these in the Send To tab, and return to your article, clicking the send to option will give you a drop down list of the options you have selected. This will take you to your Twitter page, shorten the URL for you automatically, and add the heading.

Sharing

You can share items with Reader if you choose to. Simply by clicking on the share button, this will be available to the public as a shared document, originating from you. Another fact to note is that all of your contacts from your Gmail, who themselves are also using Gmail, will be pulled into your reader as people you follow. If any of them are already using reader and sharing items, this can be a great way to find new and interesting feeds/articles. If you find that nobody is using Reader yet, you can click on the option to email them a link to your own shared items page. On your shared items page there will also be a link for them to “Get started in Google Reader” if they decided from your page that that is something they would like to pursue. 

Starring items adds them to another list altogether which can be found in the first section of the left-hand side - starred items. This is similar to the idea of favourites. This means that even after you have read the article, and it has been taken out of your feed (if you have that setting on) that you still have very easy access to the best of the articles. If you find that you don’t have time to read everything but have a chance to flick through the headlines, you can star everything that looks as though it might be worthwhile and then return to them later when you have more time and then you only have to deal with the articles you’ve starred.

Reader has also been made available as an iPhone app, as well as in the Android Market. Because Reader is run through your Google account, it works in much the same way as your Gmail would, with regard to the fact that you can log in on any computer or mobile Internet access, and your subscripptions will always be there, in the same way as your mail would be.

In addition to a (free) Google Account, Google Reader requires one of the following web browsers to work:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox 1.0+
• Netscape 7.2+
• Opera 9.0+
• Safari 1.3+
• Windows Internet Explorer 6+
• Wii Internet Channel

In all cases, JavaScript must be enabled for Google Reader to work.

Those are the basics. As you play with the settings you will be able top figure out what other options are available to you within Reader.

It is a very powerful resource, but it can get overwhelming, so don’t be afraid to use that “Mark all as read” button every now and then.