Brendan Cooper, your Friendly Digital Social Media PR, ummm, Thingy

This is the first of a series of tutorials. Aaargh!

Before you switch off - tutorials are such a bore - I’m going to try and make this actually interesting and relevant. There are so many tutorials on the web covering the same topics but I tend to find them a bit dry.

So I’m going to try and explain this stuff as I would have liked it explaining to me, or indeed as I explain it to other people. As someone once told me ”I’m having difficulty feeling the love with this.” So, my objective is to help you feel the love, hence the title.

I’ll be extending this across a range of tools and technologies - del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook etc - as well as cross-platform advice such as ‘How to search for stuff on the web.’ I’m also going to pitch them at basic, intermediate and advanced levels, so hopefully there’ll be something for everyone.

This one’s the basic level, also called ‘Getting to grips.’ It doesn’t cover the bells or whistles, it just explains briefly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, then takes you through to the point where you can actually use it.

It’s not the briefest tutorial style in the world because I like to get people interested and entertain them along the way. As it’s my first attempt at this I’d really appreciate any feedback, both positive and negative. Just let me know what you think.

So, first up: Getting to grips with Google Reader.

Before we start - is this for me?

If you’re finding that you spend more and more time having to scour the web for information, this is for you.

From a PR perspective, you’ll find it invaluable when monitoring online developments you need to know about. There are many conversations out there, on websites, review sites, forums and blogs. It’s a fair bet that at least some of them are about you or your client, or a product, service or brand you’re responsible for.

I have personal experience of picking up on news through Google Reader and flagging it to the client before anyone else. So Google Reader can help you win the information overload war, and your client’s favour.

OK, I’m sold. How do I get started?

First, I really really really need to give a short history lesson. Sorry about this, but you need to know why you’re about to do what you’re about to do.

Many moons ago, websites stood alone. Then search engines came along and indexed them. This was an improvement in that you could find the websites, but you still had to go out and look at them to find out if they’d changed at all.

Websites then started changing much more quickly. It became impossible to track all the changes. So, a technology came about that told you when a site had changed, and sent the content to you.

This technology is called RSS. Before you panic, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a feed, in the same way you would have a financial feed if you were a trader, or a weather feed if you were Met Office staff failing once more to predict the latest weather-related disaster to befall the UK.

When a website or blog is updated, the feed sends - syndicates - that content out. You subscribe to that feed and receive the content at your end. It is really simple.

To subscribe to a feed you just need an RSS feed reader - sometimes called an aggregator - and that’s what Google Reader is. Google Reader is cool because it’s free, you don’t need to install anything, and you can use it wherever you are.

If you want to find out more about RSS, check out the excellent Commoncraft video on the subject. Or continue below to get to grips with Google Reader.

Thanks for that. Can I get started now?

Yyyyessss… but first, if you want to use Google Reader you need a Google account. The good news is that if you use any of a number of other Google tools - Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Alerts - you’ll already have one so skip to the next section.

If you don’t, then it will take a minute to set one up. Really, it doesn’t hurt. Do this:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
2. Type in an email address that you can access wherever you are right now.
3. Type in a password, and confirm it.
4. Type in the Word verification code to prove you really are a human, not a machine.
5. Click the button to accept.

A short time later the email from Google will pop into the inbox of the email address you specified above, and you just have to confirm the account. Congratulations! You’re in.

No, really. How do I really get started?

OK, ok…

Go to http://www.google.com/reader, and sign in using your Google account. You’ll see a video explaining what Google Reader is all about. Watch it if you like! Or just close it and continue.

Look at Google Reader. Let your eye wander to the left, and up a bit, to the Add subscription field. This is what we’ll be concentrating on for now, because it’s how you’re going to add your first feeds.

But what feeds to add? Let’s say you’re interested in technology (some people are!). I quite like the BBC’s Technology coverage, so go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default.stm.

Now, in the past - that is, before you came across this tutorial - you would have gone through this page to see if there’s anything of interest. If you’re smart, you might have subscribed to the BBC’s email service which is fine, but emails aren’t the easiest way to store and retrieve information and not every website offers such a service. Also, no one really likes having a chock-full inbox, especially if they’re limited in the amount of data they can store.

Not any longer. Do this:

1. Copy the full address of the web page you’re looking at.
2. Go to Google Reader.
3. Click the Add Subscription field.
4. Paste the web address into it.
5. Click Add.

In a few seconds, as if by magic, the BBC Technology feed appears on your screen. You’ve done it! You just subscribed to your first feed.

Now, I can imagine you thinking - maybe even muttering - “So what?” to yourself. “What’s the difference between going to Google Reader to see this, and going to the BBC web page?”

Well, consider that you can now go through a huge number of web pages and subscribe to their feeds, and have them all in one place on your Google Reader screen. Instead of having to go out to each one and poll it individually, or suffer a cascade of emails, you have it in one place, uniformly and consistently presented. It’s fab. I love RSS. It shows, doesn’t it?

Now you can play around. Go to other sites that might have interesting material for you, copy their addresses, paste them into Add Subscription. Bookmark Google Reader so you can go back to it easily.

Is that it?

Pretty much, for the time being. You can just play around now. You never actually installed Google Reader, so you won’t break it either.

But there is a bit more - basically, hints and tips that will make subscriptions and reading through them easier.

Other ways to subscribe

My favourite way of subscribing is with the ‘Subscribe as you surf’ button.

It lets you look at content first, and if you like it, subscribe to it. When you click it, Google Reader pops up, previews the feed, and gives you the option to subscribe.

To add the Subscribe as you surf button:

1. Go to Google Reader.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Goodies.
4. Scroll down to the ‘Subscribe as you surf’ section.
5. Right-click the ‘Subscribe’ link, and, in the grey Windows menu that appears, click Add to Favorites (don’t worry if you get a warning message, it’s safe to do this).

Now, go to a site you haven’t subscribed to yet, and click that Subscribe button. If there is a feed, Google Reader will find it. How easy is that? You might even want to rearrange your browser toolbars so that the Subscribe button is always visible. I do.

You might also occasionally see a ‘Subscribe to Google’ button on a webpage. That’s just another nifty way of one-click subscription. Click it, and you get the option of adding it to Google Reader or your customised home page.

If Add to Subscription and the Subscribe button don’t work - and sometimes they don’t, if a site or blog is a bit odd in some way - then look for links or buttons entitled RSS or, occasionally, XML (which is just the language used to create RSS feeds). Right-click the link, click Copy Shortcut, then paste that as the address into Google Reader’s Add Subscription field. It’s a bit less quick and easy than the other methods, but only marginally so.

Other ways to read

Are you the kind of person who works off headlines only, or do you prefer to see a preamble too? Google Reader caters for both types. Towards the top right corner you can click ‘List view’ to see just the feed headlines, or ‘Expanded view’ to get a taste of the content.

I mentioned your personalised Google home page earlier. If you’re wondering what that is, well now that you have a Google Account, you can personalise your Google Search page and include feeds on that too.

To do this, go to the Google Search page, then click the iGoogle link in the top right corner and look for new stuff to add. In the search for gadgets field, type RSS, and then add the Google Reader widget.

Now go back to your iGoogle page and you’ll see it added. It’s not as comprehensive - or really as useful - as the full-on Google Reader, but in the past I’ve noticed that people who don’t ‘get’ Google Reader do understand about customising their search pages. From then it’s just one small conceptual skip to understanding, well, everything.

I’m sorry, I nodded off. What did we cover?

In this session we covered:

• Understanding a bit about RSS
• Setting up a Google Account
• Subscribing to a feed
  • Add Subscription field in Google Reader
  • Subscribe button for browser
  • ‘Subscribe to Google’ icon
  • RSS and XML icons
• Your reading choices - expanded and list view
• Adding the Google Reader widget to your personalised google home page

Now it’s your turn to experience the slightly giddy delight of gathering up feeds. Believe me, once you start, you can’t stop.

In the next, intermediate session we’ll go through organising feeds and searching through them. We’ll also look at how your Google Reader doesn’t stand alone - that is, how to share information with other people and even create your own feeds.

I hope you found this useful. I would say that, since discovering RSS feeds and the means to subscribe to them, I use the web in a radically different way. Of course, I do still browse and surf, but now I have the choice to subscribe to a site or blog if I really find it interesting. I have the choice, in effect, to become my own editor and create my own newspaper, without really trying too hard at it!