Find great stuff to read in Google Reader



Have you ever clicked the "Reader" link at the top of your Gmail inbox and ended up in Google Reader, kind of unsure about what to do next?

We realize this happens from time to time, so to help people get started with Reader, we asked a bunch of prominent journalists, techies, fashion critics, and foodies for their lists of favorite sites and blogs. We compiled their reading lists and made them accessible to everyone at google.com/powerreaders, where you can explore and subscribe to lists from Thomas Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Kottke.org, and many more.


Whether you're new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list, we hope this will be a good place to find great stuff to read. And if you want to create your own reading list to share with others, you can do that too.

See what Obama, McCain and leading political pundits are reading



Today we announced that both the Obama and McCain campaigns as well as political contributors from Newsweek to POLITICO are sharing news with Google Reader this election season. You can see their most recently shared items at google.com/powerreaders, or add the feeds from your favorite campaign or journalist to Reader to keep up with newly posted items and comments.



P.S. If you want to follow these political shared news feeds right from within Gmail, check out our post from a couple weeks ago about getting your favorite feeds in Gmail web clips.

Google Reader: Out of Labs



You may have noticed that Google Reader recently parted ways with Google Labs. If you're not familiar with Reader, it's Google's feed aggregator. Think of it as your inbox for the web: just subscribe to the news sites, blogs, or videos you want to follow. You can read all the updates in one place -- there's no need to visit 20 different sites to get all this stuff. To see how it works, try subscribing to this blog by clicking on the "Site Feed" link in the on the right-hand side. You'll find similar links on most blogs, and many news sites too. For further explanation about why feed readers are so great, watch RSS in Plain English:


So why has Reader graduated from Google Labs? There have been a bunch of feature updates in recent months. Reader now has offline access using Google Gears, a new search tool, it's available in 10 languages, and will show you trends about your reading and subscribing habits. There's even a version of Reader for the Nintendo Wii. (But, really, we found the chemistry with Labs just wasn't there anymore.)