Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed.

These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

It's pretty damn cool what Google has done here. You can now make a feed out of anything. It has been suggested that RSS is on the way out because publishers want to force people to go click through to their sites to view content, but then Google goes and does something like this that throws that idea out that window. 

I love RSS and Google Reader. I'm not sure how you could actually untangle the web without it. I've hear some echo the idea that Twitter will overtake RSS, but I'm not really sure that Twitter does much for contextually relevant information. 140 characters really doesn't cut it.

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.
based on Google Reader and Twitter.

So, this is something that flew under my radar. Probably because I only switched to Firefox recently. Before that I was using combination of Camino and Safari. Now that Firefox is my main browser, I’ve been playing around with a number of plugins.

Feedly is particularly interesting to me because it doesn’t require a login of any kind. It uses existing logins for services such as Google Reader and Twitter without actually asking for them. Since it’s a plugin, it delgates login authority to the browser itself. It organizes your information and presents it to you in a more aesthetic way than Google Reader might. It also does a number of other things, such as integrating with Twitter and providing a persistent sharing tool across all pages that lets you share content and find similar content. It’s smart, too. It makes pretty good recommendations based on the content you’re looking at. If you’re looking at a list of Photoshop tutorials, for example, it will recommend other sites that people have recently liked or shared in Google Reader as suggestions.

There is also something compelling about Feedly’s information architecture. They way everything is laid makes it feel considerably different from the format of most blogs. Feedly is designed to be used to aggregate information from separate sources, but I’d be interested to see what a version of Feedly looks like which can dissect and reorganize information from a single source. As we move into a more semantic web infrastructure, that’s probably not far off. I’d love to see what a site like CNN look like when you can pipe it into an application that can reorganize it in any number of ways.

Only have a 10 minute coffee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called "magic" that re-orders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order. Click "Sort by magic" under the "Feed settings" menu of your feed (or folder) to switch to personalized ranking. Unlike the old "auto" ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best — the more you "like" and "share" stuff, the better your magic sort will be.

The above excerpt is a taken from the Official Google Reader Blog about a relatively new feature in Google Reader called "Sort by magic."

Today I was talking to a few people about how I manage to stay up to date with everything that's happening on the interwebs. The answer to that question has changed over the years, but for the past few weeks I've been making extensive use of a new feature in Google Reader which lets you sort through RSS feeds by "magic."

I have about 100 different RSS and Atom feeds that are grouped into a few larger folders (blogs, desgin, comics, etc.), and I sort by magic for each of those folders. The really interesting thing about "Sort by magic" is that it's personalized. The algorithm bubbles things to the top based on what you've been reading, liking, and sharing. Even if two people have the exact same list of feeds, Google Reader will display a different list of articles for for each person.

Feeds are a tricky thing to manage, especially today when bloggers and publishers are racing to put out as much content as possible. This new magical feature is quite remarkable. It's a great filter for anyone who subscribes to more than a dozen feeds and doesn't have the entire day to read through them. If you aren't using it, you should be.