Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader

In this era of data smog, the knowledge worker who can act like an agile ninja by consuming vast quantities of information, synthesizing it and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time is invaluable. For knowledge worker ninjas, RSS is your shuriken.

I have been using various RSS readers for nearly five years now - I've tried them all. However, none matches the power of Google Reader. I have found that if you tap into all of its features, it's the Holy Grail of Personal Knowledge Management.

So as 2007 winds down and thoughts turn to productivity and prosperity in the new year, I offer these tips to help. Share your own thoughts in the comments. (Some of these may work with RSS readers from Newsgator, Bloglines and others but they are written with Google in mind.)

This post has several parts ...

* The Core Philosophy: Google Reader is a database and a feed reader
* Continually add tons of feeds in organized, methodical way
* Establish a taxonomy that makes retrieval and sharing easy using on-the-fly tagging
* Annotate your data by connecting Reader to Gmail or Blogger
* Putting it all together - sorting, searching and sharing

The Core Philosophy: Google Reader is a database and a feed reader

Most people who use RSS readers do so with the intent of subscribing to an aggregated river of news feeds, persistent searches and blogs. However with the recent addition of search, the Google Reader became much more. Like Gmail, Reader should be viewed as a database that you can build from scratch and continually hone. I wrote about this in September when the feature launched, but I see far more potential now than I did then. This philosophy is key - Google Reader = news aggregator + custom feed database.

Continually add tons of feeds in organized, methodical way

Second, I encourage you to throw as many feeds as you can at the Google Reader just so you can capture and mine it. This should include relevant feeds that you never have any intention of reading or even scanning. For example, I subscribe to high volume streams like Twitter timelines, AP news syndicates, various digg feeds and more. These generate a torrent of posts but I don't let them get in my way. The key is to add them to a special folder that is separate from other feeds that you actually read or scan. This way, with a click of a button you can clear these items but still cache 'em. However, the great news is that you can always go back and search and/or retrieve them later, as you can see below.

For those feeds you do want to read or scan, I would also suggest filing them away by context as Daniel Miessler recommends here. The great thing that Google Reader does is a allow feeds to sit in multiple folders. This allows me to store some feeds in a "mobile" folder that I have bookmarked on my mobile phone, even as they also reside in a "blogs" folder. Set up folders by context - including computers, contexts (online/offline/etc) and devices.

Establish a taxonomy that makes retrieval and sharing easy using on-the-fly tagging

One of Google's best, yet underutilized features is tagging. This differs from folders. As I mentioned earlier this week, Google let you tag individual posts/items and then easily retrieve these later using the keyboard shortcut. Lifehacker covers all of this here.

Tagging is an incredibly powerful tool for becoming a knowledge management ninja - especially in PR. As you're reading feeds you can tag them for sharing with a select group or for easy retrieval in the future.

For example, let's say your job is to compile a report to your boss at the end of the week. As you scan, simply tag all of the potential items you want to include with "report." Now you can easily retrieve these posts. However, there's more. You can search them too! This is powerful because you are adding a layer of structure to what is basically a giant pile of information that someone else decided to organize for you when the feed was established.

Anotate your data by connecting Reader to Gmail or Blogger

Other than simple tags, Google Reader doesn't let you add notes to your posts or feeds. However, when you email items out of Google Reader you can add up to 1,000 characters. I recommend sending these into your Gmail Personal Nerve Center so that they get filed away with a certain tag. Another option is to email them into a private Blogger blog using their post by email function. Ruud Hein suggests another way of doing this with Feedburner. I would suggest coupling this with tags as opposed to starred items.

Putting it all together - sorting, searching and sharing

Now that you have your personal knowledge management system up and running, you can begin to pull it all together. For example, start filing away items under tags. Share the tag (privately) with colleagues and get this information out more widely. If you want to make this less kludgy, run the feed through Feebdurner as Ruud describes above and let every one subscribe via email.

Here's another idea. If you are tagging items by client name or project name, you can later go back and run a scoped search within that tag. Even better, you can do the same with specific feeds and folders. So if your boss calls you up and asks you how many times The New York Times used the name of your company in a headline, you can easily give him or her an answer.

This is all just the beginning but you can see where I am going. Set this system up in a way that works best for you. Don't be afraid of too much information. Embrace it. Revel in it. But wrangle it like cattle to make it truly work for you. Be a ninja in 08. Go forward and good luck.

Comments

[Steve Cherrier]

Great system, Steve. Thanks for sharing!

[Sami Viitamäki]

Helpful post, Steve.

Google Apps still miss at least one major piece before being a true knowledge management system: a (good) del.icio.us like tool for storing, tagging and sharing all the URLs you might come across regardless of where you found them. Reader is no good for links you stumble upon on the web without using the reader. What's more, on the Reader you often can't read the whole article/post, but need to go to the source itself and away from the Reader.

On both these occasions I still use del.icio.us and, in order to keep things compact, do also the rest of my link sharing (also those links I could share through the Reader directly) through this great service.

[Steve Lubetkin]

Hi, Steve. Great use of Google Reader, very similar to how I have structured my use of FeedDemon. I have news feeds organized into FD folders by geography (States and Countries) or wire services, and then use keyword watches to filter everything by client or topic area of interest. In the watch folders I can blog or email any feed item to the appropriate client or interested party.

Is there something specifically valuable about doing this in Google Reader instead? I'm starting to become convinced through my use of Google Docs and Google Notebooks that web-based apps can take the place of standalones that require constant synching. But with Google Reader, what's the value of moving from where I am now?

Thanks!

[Jason Davies]

@Sami: There's Google Bookmarks of course but I guess it doesn't really support sharing at the moment.

[Steve Rubel]

@steve All these systems work. It depends on your style. There's certainly a lot of merit to organizing this on the desktop.

[Craig McGinty]

Plenty of juicy stuff in here to play with :-)
I'm sure it's been mentioned in the past but to link up del.icio.us with GReader I subscribe to the RSS feed of a personal tag I have given to certain stories.
Like Steve suggests I don't actually read the articles, I just know they are there for future searches, and can cross reference them with other articles.

[Marcel de Ruiter]

Great tutorial Steve!

Too bad all of this is useless when checking out these apps from the office, where all of this does not work. Must be this Active X stuff that is not trusted by our system admins. I get to run Gmail on the html version only...

[Joseph Thornley]

Thanks for the very useful overview Steve.

Just one quibble: "Other than simple tags, Google Reader doesn't let you add notes to your posts or feeds. However, when you email items out of Google Reader you can add up to 1,000 characters." Why bother with the extra hassle when you can tag and add a comment in a single step with del.icio.us?

[Mike Reynolds]

As a power user of Google Reader, I have to say this is the best article I've ever read on Google Reader.

[Abhijeet Mukherjee]

Steve...can we use Google Gears with Google Reader?...if not then your post does not mention the fact that you have to be online to use Google reader which may not be feasible always...on the other hand a desktop based reader like RSS Bandit(which I use) can do a number of things offline and also synchronize the feeds online with newsgator.No doubt about the fact that Google reader is a great product and recently Dale,developer of RSS Bandit, mentioned about an ongoing effort which could later produce the RSS innovation of the millennium-RSS Bandit synchronized with Google Reader!!!

[Daniel Bachhuber]

Hell, you could even just add every feed on the internet and use the power of Google to sort and index it. Wait, I think someone already did that: Google!

I appreciate the concept of putting feeds into folders based on importance. My Google Reader is filled with streams organized on subject or industry; although this is helpful for when I want to find a certain type of content, it doesn't help at all for when I need to triage and only read the most important news.

Limited the number of RSS feeds one subscribes to is a very important skill, however. I disagree with letting folders pile up with 1000+ items and then just "marking as read." Although there is some value in being able to go back and find articles on certain subjects, that is also what Google Search is for (or maybe Google Custom Search). It's simply poor feng shui to have that much clutter in your "inbox."

Good ideas nonetheless!

[TravisPUK]

@abhijeet: Yes Google Reader is one of the only Google apps that currently supports Google Gears. Works really well also, however I think that it does not store the images associated with a post when offline... for obvious reasons of course.

[Tiffany Monhollon]

I've been using Bloglines for so long, I have never really "shopped" RSS readers. Glad you highlighted the usefulness of the various features. I'll have to seriously consider a change. I'm always trying to find the best way to organize links that I want to use in future posts, and it seems like tagging stuff in my reader by category might work.

[Jorge Diaz Tambley]

Great post, thank you very much... I read some blogs with google reader and some blogs with bloglines... I think I'll move this to greader

[Syahid A.]

Could not agree more. Been using it and can't stop!

[rick burnes]

Great post. Do you know if there's a way to assign tags to items based on filtering criteria, eg "assign the tag 'Google' to all posts from micropersuasion.com that include the word 'Google'"?

Gmail allows you to do something similar, and it is very helpful.

[David Martin]

Bravos, Steve. Outstanding primer, thank you for sharing. Happy New Year. All the best,

[Ron Atchley]

Ron Atchley
Xango Distributor, Xango Mangosteen Juice Business Opportunity
828-453-9946 tri-city@blueridge.net

[fiksi]

yes. this google reader is so helpful as well as powerful!

[Dung Nguyen]

Wow, great post. Thanks and Happy New year :)

[Bob Walsh]

Excellent post Steve!
Two things immediately struck me:
1. I really hope the right people @Google are reading this and soon make it possible to not have to do the "comment via gmail dance", revs google bookmarks to work with greader and finally does something with Jotspot so that you could put that in play as well.
2. There's a general network effect with shared RSS lists out of greader but there's also a trust/ip issue. Has anyone set up a service/portal to connect - or at least discover/list - like-minded shared RSS feeds?

[2thyme]

To follow up on the comments of Daniel, above, I also dump just about every worthwhile feed into Google Reader, using folders to organize by subject or theme. I can then use the Google Reader search features to locate an article I remember reading much more quickly.

However, the trick or skill is not to limit how many feeds you subscribe to in Google Reader, just to triage the quality of the feed and to set up a good folder-based filing system there.

In order to winnow the 1000+ articles that result, run your aggregated Google Reader folder feeds through Yahoo Pipes (for custom filtering) or AideRSS and FeedHub (for automated filtering).

Then use your favorite client-based feed reader to subscribe to the filtered feeds (or send 'em back to Google Reader if that's your favorite). If you want to share or publish one of the filtered feeds, run it though FeedBurner to obfuscate any Google or Yahoo account info.

[ian fenwick]

I also can't see any real advantage over delicious (except for not having to remember where all the dots go)

[Carlos Lopez]

Hi everybody,

After reading this article I started testing the Google reader, unfortunately I still don't find what I'm looking for. Instead of tagging each post individually, I would like to find an rss reader able to use the tagging list for automatic filtering of a bunch of rss feeds. Which online service or freeware is able to do that? What I want to do is to save various search/filters, and get an extract of all corresponding articles in several blogs with one click...

[Mark Stoneman]

The unspoken assumption here is that people actually need all this data. Perhaps you could speak to why you think individuals should collect so much data in the first place? Sure, you talk about "knowledge workers" and "ninjas", but those are only buzzwords. How does having a personal collection of such a huge amount of data fit into the equation?

I should add, perhaps, that I do history, not tech news and media trends, so my research scenarios look rather different. Speaking to that bias might be useful to others too, though, insofar as not everyone equates research with data mining. Or perhaps you don't either and I am missing something?