Several people have asked my how I stay connected with so many blogs.  Currently, I check in with 38 blogs every day.  Often more than once each day.

If I had to visit each site individually, I would never do it.  I couldn’t remember all the URLs, or what the last article was I looked at on the site.  It would be a mess.

Luckily, I found the Google Reader (yes, I like the Google Kool-Aid).  This is a web-based tool that lets me keep current with all my blogs.  It’s nice, down the left side is a list of the blogs I follow.  For the blogs with new content, they’re listed in bold and the number of new postings is shown in parenthesis.  Much like the way an email program shows folders.

Clicking on a blog loads the postings into the right side.  You can have the postings shows as just a list, or a scrolling area with the full article content.  When you’re done, you can mark the articles as read.  The blog name will then go back to a normal font until there are new articles.

Google Reader makes it easy for me to keep up on my blog reading.  This is particularly true for sites that don’t get updated very often.

Adding a blog is really easy.  Just look for the syndication or subscription link.  Usually flagged with an icon like this: .  Just copy the URL, in Reader click “Add a Subscription”, paste in the URL and click “Add”.  You’re done.

You can even organize your blogs into categories if you like.

You can “star” individual articles so you can come back to them later, for example, I will star an article that I want to share with someone else or write an article about.  Anything I want to remember for later.  You can share articles and email them to others.  Very slick product.

The other thing I like is that it’s online.  I can access the same blogs from any of my computers and the read/unread status is the same everywhere.

How do you manage your list of favorite blogs?  Speak up in comments.

Get more at http://www.google.com/reader