I started playing with a new toy using a new tool this week – Google Reader.  OK, so its not new.  Its not even new to me: I had a look at it soon after it started but then put it aside.  The real anoraks out there can form an orderly queue while I assume the now-legendary Bishop Brennan position in readiness.

Its not that I am out of touch with technology; I am usually aware of what is going on and what is possible but when I hear of newer and easier ways to do something I am happy doing the old and long way I tend to stick with my old methods for an unreasonably long time.  Its why I still do a lot of manual HTML.  So although I know what feed aggregators do I was content to do it myself: I had various blogs and other sites bookmarked and would look them all up every now and then if I remembered.

All the time I was also relying on Bloggers4Labour, which is also a feed aggregator, of course.   The thing is that it has now picked up so many feeds that its not easy to keep on top of it.  What I really needed was a way to customise it a bit to highlight the sites I like best and to add the non-Labour sites I like…  at which point I did the forehead-slapping thing and decided it was time to give Google Reader another chance.

Now, a week or two later, I can’t think why I didn’t like it the first time around, and its got its own button on the Firefox toolbar and is already one of the select few sites I will visit every time I log in – along with Flickr and BBC News.