Google Reader

I have been started to read a great number of blogs recently. Each day I want to read any new posts from these blogs. I accomplished this by visiting each of the blogs. This probably made the bloggers happy. But it was getting tedious, especially when I visited each of the blogs and there were no updates.

Other people who read blogs seem to use readers to manage the new content from the blogs they read. Since I use Google products for most of my new needs, I decided to try out Google Reader. I have to say that it was a little confusing to use this tool. I added all the blogs I read. However after I changed some of my settings, the screen seemed to change.

Since Google Reader is a tool with a web front end (you access it through your browser), I was able to hit the back button to get the screens looking like they started. I have seen a new gadget for blogs that shows blog followers. If I sign up to read blog content using Google Reader, do I then show up as a follower to that blog?

I am pretty new in the world of blog readers. Right now I am not sure what other products there are out there which do the same thing as Google Reader. I might want to do a quick survey of the blog readers before I settle on Google Reader.