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 Due to this many blogs do not publish full feeds and instead just give an excerpt of the entire post in the feeds.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:

Daniel recently talked about declaring May 1st as the RSS awareness day. There is also a dedicated website for the purpose: http://rssday.org/ . This website helps to acquaint people with RSS and explain it in a simple manner in order to attract more internet users towards this wonderful technology.

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 .