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.