Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Use Google Reader!

Google reader is awesome. A lot of amazing artists these days have blogs (and most are way better than this one). Collecting those in one place is a great way to follow what others are doing and keep yourself inspired. I add at least a couple new blogs to my Reader list each week.

Seriously, as an artist you owe it to yourself. Here is just a small sampling of the folks I stalk follow with Reader. And if you have some good blogs to recommend, post in the comments!


(Most of the time you can just paste the link into Reader and it'll find the RSS feed. Many sites also have feeds available for news and updates even if they aren't a blog per se. As a general rule, any time I find an interesting source of ongoing content, I try to add it to Reader.)

4 comments:

Matthew Scheuerman said...

Thanks so much for posting this. I've been meaning to write a blog post like this for over two years now, never got around to it. And Now I don't have to! LOL

I just started following you on Google's Followers option, and whenever I find a blogger blog I like I always use that option instead of adding the rss feed to my reader because it will propogate over to my reader.

Every day I scan through about 1000 reader items. It's like checking 200 artist's blogs ALL AT THE SAME TIME. (I know you know most of this but I'm just sharing it for your readers.)

My wife is now on reader and I can share things that help us out at home with the kids, so some of the items I share aren't art related. As I share and like items I begin to find more people who follow the same blogs and like the same stuff so it's almost like meeting up with friends and talking about art.

For FAST browsing I learned some hotkeys:

J = next item
K = previous item
S = Star (I use star for stuff I want to return to)
Shift + S = Share
L = like

I can honestly say that because I get to see the very best art EVERYDAY from various blogs, It has made me a better artist.

Matthew Scheuerman said...

I want to also note: be careful who you follow, try to get a sense of who they are before you start reading their shared items. Some people read and share content that is NSFW so you don't want it interfering with your day job!

juliebroom said...

I'm a complete google reader addict too, there are so many great artists blogs out there. Thanks for sharing the blogs above I'll be adding a few of those to my ever expanding list.

Mike McCain said...

"I can honestly say that because I get to see the very best art EVERYDAY from various blogs, It has made me a better artist."

--exactly!

Here's a few more from my list recently:

http://conceptrobots.blogspot.com
http://hoviga.blogspot.com
http://rhemdoodles.blogspot.com
http://kanmuftic.blogspot.com
http://plumedecorbeau.canalblog.com/
http://luyangartbox.blogspot.com

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