Dot Your Feeds

Here's a tip for our news junkies out there. I've recently been playing with Google's RSS Reader. They've implemented a really fast online feed reader that's a great way to skim through the RSS feeds you subscribe to. They also have a sharing feature that creates a web page (My Shared Page) and an associated RSS feed of all the stories you want to "share". Here's where Blue Dot comes in. I have set up the Auto-Dotting from My Blog feature of Blue Dot, to automatically scan the shared items I've read in Google reader, and create corresponding dots. That way, my friends on Blue Dot can see (and comment) on what I'm reading. Click here to see what my Google Reader items look like in Blue Dot. Here's how to set up Google Reader to share your favorite feeds on Blue Dot:

1. Create a Google Reader account if you don't already have one.
2. Subscribe to your favorite news feeds (Google offers some suggestions if you don't already have some).
3. When you read a story you want to share, click the "Share" button at the bottom of the article (alternately, just type SHIFT-S, to use the keyboard shortcut).
4. Click on "Shared Items" in the left hand column. You should see your stories listed here.
5. Click on the "a feed" link and copy the text from your browser's Address bar (it will look something like: http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/09892608792699866194/state/com.google/broadcast
6. Log in to Blue Dot and go to your Auto-Dotting page (Tools/Auto Dot From My Blog).
7. Choose "Custom Feed" and paste the above link into the URL field.
8. I use the tag "fromrss" to identify my Google Reader dots.
9. Click Configure Blog.

Whew! That's it. You should notice your new shared dots created in your account within 30 minutes. Blue Dot periodically will check your Google Reader account to see if you've shared anything new. Send me (mike) a message on Blue Dot if you set this up in your account or if you have any problems.