Too many blogs? Let your friends do the work.

If you read your blogs using Google Reader, they have a great feature that can help you A) get more out of the blogosphere, and B) filter your reading to only the best posts out there as selected by your friends.

Reading your friends or co-workers shared feeds is like having a big filter on the blogosphere. Assuming your friends "share" only interesting or useful posts that they find, your aggregated "shared items" feed will be a best-of all the blogs that your friends read. This is a great way to keep up on blogs that you might not read very often or subject areas where you don't need to keep up with day-to-day postings.

Here at Palo Alto Software we have been doing this for quite some time but through the more cumbersome method of aggregating our shared feeds through a 3rd party service called xFruits. While this works, it's difficult to add new shared feeds.

Adding your friends' shared item feeds to Google Reader is unfortunately not easy. You have to go to Gmail or Google Talk to invite people. There is not mechanism in Google Reader to invite friends directly. Hopefully Google will add this feature soon.