Hey! What happened?

Yeah, I'm back from vacation -- back to a full in-box (both e-kind and paper kind) and another short week, since I'm leaving to attend my cousin's wedding down in Knoxville, Tenn.

My productivity tip for today is Google Reader, which might not be news to most of you, but has been a revelation for me. I had been using Newsgator as my RSS reader, and it's a fine service, but Google's got them beat. I had resisted moving over to Google Reader because I really didn't want to spend the time and energy of bringing over all of my RSS feeds -- so much easier to stick with what works. Well, I switched and I'm glad I did:

• Adding feeds to Google is quicker and easier.
• You can easily view older entries from the feed -- they're marked as read but not hidden. In fact, you can just scroll right through them, as far back as you want to go.
• Click on a feed, then just hit the space bar to mark an item as read and move to the next one. You can power through your whole list in no time.
• Unlike other RSS readers (I'm looking at you, Yahoo -- I used to be a big fan of My Yahoo), I've never received an error message when trying to add a feed.

If you're in association communications and you're not using an RSS reader, you're wasting a lot of time. Here's why -- you can easily set up news feeds for all of the topics you cover and names in the news. In your job, you need to be the first to know.

Well, on the road again. Later.

Tagged: Associations, Blogging.