Conflicting Reports
On the new Google Reader, Jason Clarke says:
“It also solves the biggest knock against Bloglines, which is that clicking on a feed doesn’t immediately mark every post in that feed as read – they’re only marked read as you scroll past them.”
While Steve Matthews, in a post talking about the 5 things he hates about the new Google Reader says:
“I have to manually mark everything I read by scrolling over it. A big waste of time.”
So which is accurate Google Reader users? For the record, I’ve been a Bloglines user for years and have never, ever seen the behavior Jason describes as a Bloglines “knock”. In fact, one of the reasons I chose not to use Google Reader way back when was because, as Steve points out, you can’t click on a category folder and load everything in those feeds and have it all marked read.
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In the new Google Reader, it (by default) will mark an item as read when either you click on it, or navigate to it using the keyboard navigation. In addition, you can view all feeds in one category/tag/label at once and there is a “Mark All Read” link that works.
(side note: blogger’s comment interface sucks; I wish I could still see your post while typing my comment)
I understand what Aaron is saying, but I don’t want to mark ‘everything’ as read, just a single folder. I build my time management into feed reading, and prioritize each folder. If I don’t have time, the folder gets marked as read, and I stick to my ‘A’ list.
Thanks for reading Mike.
Steve
I started used Google Reader last week instead of Bloglines, and I don’t think I’ll go back. I find the mark-as-read behavior with Google Reader an improvement over Bloglines, especially combined with the list view. I can now scan my 300+ feeds much faster than with Bloglines.
Papa, that surprises me, because in the original Google Reader implementation, it was WAY slower than Bloglines, at least in the way I read my feeds. Perhaps that’s changed that much, or perhaps we scan our feeds differently.
Aaron, the blogger comments interface does suck. Maybe the new version they have in beta will improve that. I haven’t signed up to move to the beta version yet, nor have I paid much attention to what’s improved, so maybe I’ll take a look.