There’s a new feature on Google Reader – at least I haven’t seen it before. It’s mildly confusing, but interesting in an ‘information geek’ way.
In the Subscriptions tab (of Settings) you now have the option to ‘Add to a folder…’. If you have no folders, you can create a new one. So i did; I called it test123.
The blog then appears in the folder test123 in your main reader view.
Ok, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to get rid of this. You can’t drag the feed back out of the folder (very un-web 2.0 😉 ), so I flick back to settings. In the tags tab, you can see the new ‘folders’ are actually tags.
From here, feeds apparently belong to tags, not folders. This is a little confusing.
Finally, it appears (is this new?) that you can share tags (aka folders) as public feeds in themselves, much like you could with ‘Your shared items’. Click the little broadcast-icon and you get:
Your “test123” items have been made public. Now, anyone can read them in Google Reader or subscribe to their feed.
Neat, so it appears your can accumulate a selection of feeds based on tags/folders and share them with the world. Isn’t this one step from OPML reading lists?