A Feed Reader is certainly one of the most heavily used tools by bloggers and freelancers . It helps bloggers to keep track of various developments in the blogosphere and other stories of their interest .

There are a huge number of feed readers available , both browser based and desktop feed readers . And after trying a huge number of feed readers , which includes desktop based readers like FeedDemon and RSS Bandit and online readers like Bloglines , I have come to the conclusion that Google Reader is the best , especially for those ( like me and Robert Scoble ) who navigate hundreds of feeds in a day .

So today I’d like to share some of the cool features of Google Reader which make it truly the best .

1: Work offline using Google Gears

Yes , you can see your feeds offline in Google Reader using Google Gears . Although it is still in beta and may cause your browser to crash sometimes , but still its worth using and enhances the functionality of reader beyond the online sphere .

2: Add Comments within Posts

Do you know that you can add comments within every post you read without going out of Google Reader? The only thing which you will need to do is install Better GReader extension for Firefox (ya…only for Firefox..sorry IE users) , and it adds a Preview button at the end of each post which when clicked , opens the blog within Reader and you can leave your comments without leaving Reader . The screenshot is below .

3: Excellent Keyboard Shortcuts

Every Feed Reader has keyboard shortcuts and you can modify them , but Google Reader has excellent keyboard shortcuts by default , which are quite sensible . Example: g+t for go to Tags and g+a for go to all items…and if you forget , you can simply press Shift+? and it will display all the shortcuts right there .

4: Easy Email Of Posts

You just need to press ‘e’ on a post which you want to email .Thats it . It immediately allows to you to email the post . And combine it with the Gmail filter trick , you actually have a huge advantage . For example I have created a Gmail filter for ‘ feeds’ label and I can email posts to abhim12+feeds at my gmail and I can aggregate feeds which are my personal favorites , in gmail . (Yes, abc@gmail.com and abc+edf@gmail.com are the same addresses)

5: Public And Private Sharing Of Feeds

Sharing of feeds in Google Reader is a feature which can be utilized very effectively .You can get shared feeds from your friends and also share your feeds with them .You can also privately share feeds . Steve Rubel has an excellent post on it here .

6: Tagging and Folders

I am a huge fan of tagging as a feature and I believe that it has revolutionized the way we collect and organize information . Google Reader offers you this feature to use with ease . Also you can create some tags as folders and organize your feeds in a much better way . I’ll write an elaborate post on that later .

7: Also helps to give a good view of your Mobile Blog

This is not directly a feature of Google Reader but it can be used to generate a mobile friendly version of your blog . Amit has elaborately written about it here . Hence if you are concerned about your readers who read your blog on their cellphones then this can prove very useful .

And last but not the least, Google Reader is an online feed reader . So it will work on any computer of the world having internet and a browser .
Hence I strongly recommend you to give Google Reader a shot , if you haven’t tried it yet . Its worth that…believe me . And this is just the first post in the series of posts which I am going to write about Google Reader and RSS feed management . So stay tuned…