I (Heart) Google Reader

Who loves Google Reader? I do. And apparently I’m not alone.

On Saturday, Feedburner started using its new Google-given ability to reflect the number of subscribers using Google Reader and the result was astounding. I saw my subscribers on Unmatched Style jump a whopping 50%, and other bloggers are reporting similar gains.

Why does that matter to you? Well, since being a good neighbor is so important to the health of your blog, it’s important to have a great feed reader. Without it, you can quickly get swamped by all the blogs you subscribe to. (You do subscribe to a lot of blogs, right? Why visit them all every day when you can have all the posts sent right to you?)

I’ve been using Google Reader for a few months now and absolutely love it. It has its quirks, and I hate that it’s all online where Google Desktop can’t index the posts for me to search later, but it has finally given me the ability to read every post from every blog I subscribe to in chronological order. That, in turn, has allowed me to subscribe to new blogs at will, knowing it’s now easy to keep up and easy to unsubscribe if I later find them not to be worthwhile after all.

Have you tried Google Reader? If so, what do you think? What other news readers do you like?