For the past few months, Google Reader has been my go-to site. I love reading blogs because of the rawness of the content – unadulterated, personal and at the forefront of what is cool.

Here are my top 10 reasons for using Google Reader:

1. Google Reader helps me keep up-to-date with my favourite blogs (like Savannah!).
2. It makes keeping up with blogs as simple as checking your email. It tells you the number of unread entries, and as you read them, it checks them off.
3. Subscribing is super easy – all you do is pop the URL of the blog into the subscribe box, hit the button and you’re off!
4. Everything is all in one place. No more going to ten or twenty different blogs, Google Reader collects everything together – all you have to do is select your chosen source from the sidebar.
5. It recommends other interesting sources of information. Based on your subscriptions, Google Reader suggests other blogs to you, and it is uncannily good!
6. It strips out all of the really terrible formatting that is synonymous with ordinary people (read: ‘non-designers’) doing their own web layouts. Enough said!
7. You can ’star’ entries that are particularly of interest (e.g.: a recipe that looks really tasty, a cute little craft project you’d like to get around to), and it has a category for starred entries, allowing you to quickly and easily find them again, without the need for trawling through your browser’s Favourites/Bookmarks.
8. You can tag entries. Much like ’starring’ entries, this allows you to easily come back to content later on. However, the difference here is that you can categorise the entries via your own criteria. This is the same theory as tagging favourites in Firefox or categorising emails.
9. It shows ‘trends’, allowing you to see which of your subscriptions you are most faithful to, and which are the most popular with others. (this lets you know just how cool you are). It’s just an interesting little bonus feature.
10. Your Google username and password are valid across a whole range of Google’s other services, so it integrates blog reading with the rest of your Google use.