Blogging, Google Reader and Google Toolbar

Do you sometimes regret that you don't have time to read all these important environmental news? And do not want to have more emails? Try Google Reader! The Reader will collect RSS Feeds for you in one place. You can quickly browse through the feeds and mark those of them which are interesting as:

• starred - probably to come to them again and again;
• with labels (e.g. "wind energy") - to be able to retrieve them later according to classification;
• as shared to be available to your friends.

I find it especially useful that you can pre-categorize RSS feeds, for example, all feeds referring to search on "oil" in BBC News will be classified as "energy" and all fields from the IEMA will be classified as "environment". Multiple classification is of course possible, this is not Windows folders!

Most of the periodicals, newspapers, environmental bulleting and Websites provide RSS feeds. You can collect a feed from Picasa (to watch for new photos), Facebook and even this blog!

Yes, you don't actually need to go to this Webpage to check what is new, it is sufficient to subscribe to the feed on the right-hand side and then it will come to your Google Reader.

So, can we use Reader for Blogging. Yes!

Using the Reader for Blogging
The little box on the left-hand side of this Blog called "Envbits" via Aleh is automatically generated by my Google Reader. Every time I see an interesting piece of news I classify it as "envbits" and I have tuned Settings so that it is automatically sent to this blog. You need to have administrative privileges on the blog to do that.

A more straitforward but less elegant way of fast blogging is if you have Google Toolbar installed in your browser (IE or Firefox). It has a button called "Send to ..." and when you press the button you can choose to send the thing to your blog. It sends a snap of the page and its source and then you can edit it.

More to come ...