Mariamz

I’ve used Google Reader many times to create bundles of blogs for monitoring and outreach in line with topic interest areas. The beauty of it is once you have compiled a hard-hitting list of blog RSS feeds you can share them as a bundle with others on your team… without them even needing to know what RSS is. This also makes it particularly easy to hand over when moving on to the next project.

The tool is also very useful to integrate different bloggers’ material into sites from an editorial perspective – when I set up the Guardian Global Development blogosphere the display of external blogs was run via Google Reader. The highlighting of specific blogposts on the back-end was achieved via an editor or community co-ordinator simply starring posts from Reader’s blog-post view – again, making for a simple content management user experience.

So I thought it worth highlighting what Michael Tieso has done with his list of 160 independent travel bloggers – because it’s not often you see someone being as generous with their efforts identifying good blogs. He has used Google reader’s capacity to share blog bundles publicly – compiling a list of over 160 independent travel bloggers for anyone to subscribe to.

You can find the travel bloggers bundle and subscribe to it here (you will need a Google account to use reader). For those of you new to reader – doing this means all the latest posts from those travel bloggers will appear in your reader from now on. You will also be able to search within that specific bundle in your Google reader for items of interest. Michael Tieso can be found @artofbackpackin on Twitter.

Sea life picture from My Itchy Travel Feet