Startup Dojo

Do you still use Google Reader (or any RSS reader) to consume your news? I know I still do, on top of the news I get via Twitter and Tumblr. For me, it’s my morning newspaper I go through everyday to see what’s going on. Although, I never felt that I wasn’t connecting as much as I wanted to with the folks writing the content…and I wanted to change that.

About a month ago, I made a small, but substantial, change to my Google Reader which instantly made the content I was reading more personal. I wanted to connect with these blogs at a different level, and what better way to do that than to connect with the writers themselves.

One Step to Personalize your Google Reader:

• Step One: Change all the blog names to the author’s name

I renamed Startup Marketing Blog to Sean Ellis, TechFlash Microsoft Blog to Todd Bishop, Yes You May to May Peria, and Yahoo! Cagewriter to Steve Cofield — just to name a few. This turned it around for me. Now, I was able to connect the style of writing, opinions, questions, discussions, etc. to the people writing the blogs rather than just the blog itself. Again, not a huge change, but mentally seeing the author names rather than the blog names made a difference and made me more active within their communities.

This might not work for blogs at TechCrunch, CagePotato, or Seattle 2.0 since they have multiple authors — but for most of my blogs it did. Try it out, it doesn’t take a whole lot of time and let me know what you think after a week.