Update: In an email conversation Ionut Alex Chitu suggested a better way to do it. It is by using this url : http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/-/label/FOLDER where Folder is the name of folder you are trying to export. He has further written an elaborate blog post on it.

Let’s say you love reading blogs related to different subjects and subscribe to a lot of feeds in your Google Reader. You’ve organized  the feeds under different folders and tags representing different categories. Now your friend asks you what productivity related blogs you read and demands the specific list of feeds.

The best choice is to give the OPML file which contains the list of your productivity related feeds so that he can use it to subscribe to all of them in one click in his feed reader. But like most of the other web based RSS readers, Google Reader doesn’t support export of specific feeds. So either you give him the feed urls manually or export your subscriptions and then edit the OPML file yourself.

Editing the OPML file could be difficult and time consuming for a non-developer mind. Instead one can use this workaround to extract selected feeds from Google Reader.

Although Google Reader is an amazing feed reader, there are some simple things which you may not be able to do directly in that. Like renaming a tag or folder. There’s no straight forward process to do that in Google Reader and there are some steps involved.

So lets say we have a folder named ‘ News ‘ in our reader which has 3 subscriptions and we want to rename it to ‘ Primary ‘. Here are the steps to do it :-

1. Go to Settings - > Subscription and go to the extreme right where you’ll find a search bar. Type the word ‘ News ‘ there.

The primary motive of RSS as a technology is to help you get new articles from a number of blogs in your feed reader so that you don’t need to visit them separately one by one. Hence this saves a great deal of time and effort and also helps you to stay updated with the latest happenings in your area of interest.

However this has also resulted in spammers scraping blog feeds and stealing content from blogs. Due to this many blogs do not publish full feeds and instead just give an excerpt of the entire post in the feeds. For a reader this could be quite time consuming if he needs to visit different blogs again and again and switch back and forth between his feed reader and the website.

But fortunately, Google Reader has an excellent feature which takes care of this problem. Its pretty simple and I’ll mention it step by step:

If you use Google Reader as your rss reader and thinking about doing a cleanup of your rss feeds, then the Trends feature can be quite useful. The Trends button is on the top left of your Reader and when you click on it, it immediately displays the stats related to your rss feed reading habits .

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 .