Playing with a few Google features...

Two awesome features that people may be interested in.

First up is Google reader. This is an RSS reader subscriber service. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, I didn't until last night. It works like this - you give it a number of site URLs that you visit often that also happen to support RSS. This (behind the scenes) "subscribes" to you them, so it there is any change on the web site, it will send the change to your Google reader. Here are some examples of things you can subscribe to in this way (it is free, of course):

• This blog (just paste in the URL), or most other blogs for that matter
• Photo sharing sites - no need to check anymore. Just include the URL, and if they post, you will then be told of the new pictures or changed albums. For example, our family/friend site. Very useful!
  
• Comics that only get published now and then. My strange favorite is www.xkcd.com.
  
• News feeds - that way new stories get pushed to you, instead of you going to your various sites to see what is new. (Personally I don't use this one, because there is just too much news in this world)
• Public Google documents, or calendars.

You can add this to your iGoogle home page for easy access.

Next, a cute trick, and it works, at least in the US: Google voice phone search. This cute and free service is like 411 - it asks you for your city, then you can ask it to look up businesses, or categories, such as "pizza". If you tell it to SMS the results (say SMS!) it does, otherwise it tells you in voice, and lets you select entries. I tried it from my office phone, and it had no problem with my voice, and told me where to get pizza.