New Feature: What I’m Reading (Shared Google Reader Feed)

I’m trying out a new idea, borrowed from My Blog Utopia, Randy Smythe’s blog.

A couple months ago, I realized that I was accumulating far too many blogs to read through the My Yahoo interface.  Over 100 at last count.  I needed a blog reader, and based on popularity of the blog readers hitting this site, I went with Google Reader.

Google Reader has been fun, especially with the Firefox modification to make it look and feel more like Mac OS X.

Well, on Randy’s blog I saw that he had a widget that showed the blog articles that he was reading.  I have seen this type of “clipping feed” on several other blogs, but WordPress doesn’t seem to have that feature.

Then I noticed it was generated by Google Reader, and I thought, “Maybe there is a way to get Google Reader to spit out an RSS feed, and then I could put it into a sidebar widget on WordPress.com”

Turns out, it just works.  I figured out how to flag a blog post as “Shared” on Google Reader, and now, on the left-hand column of this blog, you’ll see the last 10 blog articles that I have flagged.  Should be fun, since it saves me from just posting “read this” type of articles.  I can focus just on areas where I have more significant commentary.

So check it out… it’s on the left side, under the header “What I’m Reading”

Let me know what you think.