Feedly: A Useful Tool for Poetry and Everything Else

Sometimes the best sources for researching poetry are the sources that are good for researching anything else. For example, you can get a lot of poetry information just by doing a basic Google search for "poetry", "poems", or "poets". What I want to share with you today is just such a source: a tool that is great for getting information about anything, but can be put to great use for finding poems and poets.

One of the ways I get a lot of the information that I share on Twitter is through RSS [Really Simple Syndication] feeds. RSS is a format through which sites can be subscribed to, and new content can be aggregated and viewed at a central location, called an RSS reader. Google's online product for reading RSS feeds, called Google Reader, is almost unparalleled in its efficiency and ease of use. I've been using Google Reader for a long time to monitor my favorite news sites, blogs, and poetry sites. Recently I came across a great source that enhances the usefulness of my Google Reader feeds.

Feedly is a Firefox add-on [Thankfully, it works with Firefox 3.5!] that syncs with your current Google Reader account, but gives you a much richer, social reading experience. Above you can see my Feedly cover page from a couple days ago. It shows, in a magazine-like style, some of the most popular recent stories from the RSS feeds I am subscribed too. In the left column it shows which feeds have new stories, the middle two columns include some of my feed categories, and the far right column has my recent Twitter stream.

The key to Feedly is its Twitter, Friendfeed, and Digg integration. By glancing at an expanded story, you can see how many times its been liked on Friendfeed, how many diggs it has, and how many times its been shared on Google Reader. With a single click you can share the content on a plethora of social sites as well. This add-on has become my Firefox start page and has revolutionized the way I use and think of RSS feeds.

So what does all this have to do with poetry? Well as you can see, I have a poetry section for my feeds that allows me to monitor specific sites. But beyond that, Feedly offers a search feature that really kicks things into high gear. When you type a term into the page's search box, it gives you the option to "explore" or "search". Search just gives you results from your own feeds like Google Reader, but Exploring a term like "poetry" gives you a page like this:

You've got results from your own feeds, from a Google News search, from Twitter and Friendfeed, and video, pictures, and other content from the web at large. This feature allows you to track a particular interest like *cough cough* poetry across most of the web at a glance. I've taken to checking the explore page for poetry throughout the day as a way to see what's going on with poets all around the Internet. Overall, Feedly makes it easier for me to find out about the things I care about, and to share them with people I know everywhere.

Update [10-19-09]: Though still in early alpha testing, Feedly is currently porting its fantastic product to to both Chrome and Safari browsers as well as Firefox. Follow @feedly_chrome and @feedly_safari for more information.