For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been messing with Google Reader as an alternative to my Bloglines feed aggregator.

Though it was simple to export and upload the Bloglines feeds, it was a day or so before I located the [mark all as read] button, in plain sight, and I could stop deleting the old stuff I didn’t want to read again. Simple.

I’m a little blind sometimes, so I needed Tom Hoffman’s post to point out the Shared Items feature that allowed me to generate a feed of things I’ve read and chosen to share, but that I may, or may not, want to comment on. I subscribed to Tom’s Shared Items because he reads a mix of stuff that will no doubt prove interesting. It’s a little bit like the del.icio.us/network where you can sift through the gems (and the junk) that other people unearth.

There’s also a feature available from the top of the Your Shared Items Page that you can use to “share your Google Reader items with readers of your website.” There was even a style (khaki) that kind of works with my color scheme.

I like when these things talk to each other. Now I have a new little gimmick running in the sidebar.