If you don’t know about RSS feeds, check out this video first. And while there are many different feed readers, I’ve found Google Reader to be the best. Explaining Google Reader is beyond the scope of this post, but check out Google’s own introduction of it here.

I’ve needed an easier way to access Google Reader, and now I can, from within iGoogle as a gadget. And since its made by Google, it has abilities that most gadgets do not. One is that it can display things beyond the borders of its iframe. You’ll notice this in the popup bubbles when displaying a post.

You can display up to 10 posts at a time and sort by oldest or newest. You can view by Tag or Folder. And it also has two different views in the Canvas Page: Expanded and List. Remarkably, the Reader keyboard shortcuts that I love work in the Canvas view.

Everyone should be taking advantage of RSS feeds these days. Try this gadget.

I love Google. Everyday I use a multitude of their products and services to live a more efficient, knowledgeable, and connected life. But could I be getting more out of Google? Yes! And this gadget is helping me do it.

From the Official Google Blog

“The Google Tip of the Day gadget highlights some of the lesser-known or recently added members of the Google lineup, providing short, easily digested descriptions and examples. A new feature is covered each weekday, and you can catch up on what has been previously shown as well.”

Did you know that Google Image Search lets you restrict your searches to just faces, photographs, or the news?

Did you know you can restrict your Google Searches to certain periods of time?

Have you ever even heard of Google Insights for Search? (It lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames…Cool.)

While the 2009 Countdown feature is new this month, the gadget has  been around since October 2007. And it only has 56,000 users. It’s not uncommon for a gadget made by Google to have many millions of users. So, I think they’ve tacked on this 2009 Countdown feature to help market the gadget. It got my attention.

To browse the tips chronologically or at random, edit the settings to Show Navigation.

Also, if you don’t want the countdown ticking away, add the original gadget.

If you’re reading this post, chances are you’ve probably visited a real Official Google blog at least once… Yes? Google loves to post announcements about everything from their APIs to Youtube censorship fiascoes, and they’ve created this gadget to help you keep track of it all. It lets you choose a content-category from a drop down and see the latest three Google blog posts relating to that category. For example, if I choose “Google-wide” I see two postings from the official Google blog and one from the Google Mac blog.

So why is this useful? In short, in saves you from cluttering up a whole tab with Google blog feeds (if you prefer the tab, Google’s created that too). The only problem here is that for some bizarre reason the developer has included all the international blogs in the content mix, which leads to duplicated posts across countries and content showing up in Japanese, German and a bunch of other languages I don’t happen to speak. How many English speakers can read Japanese? Why isn’t they’re an option to see only English-language posts (or only Japanese posts if you’re from Japan)? Why Google, why? Apparently there are plans to use the language API to translate these foreign posts into English, but regardless, I’d still like to have the option to filter them out. In any case, if you’re a Google fan like me and you like having a little digest from their many blogs, then this gadget should come in handy.