Use Home Theater PC Optimized Google Reader for Your HDTV

You already watch the evening news from your TV, but what if you could easily read only the relevant news about topics you are interested in?

I read RSS news mostly using my iPod Touch, which is excellent for a quick glance type of news. But, if you want to drill into the article behind the headline, iPod and other mobile devices have their limitations in terms of speed and content readability. Thus, for serious browsing I prefer my Mac Mini and LCD TV.

To make news easily readable on your living room browser, I prefer using RSS feed reader like Google Reader. Google describes its RSS reader, Google Reader, a magazine that you design. To my experience, using news feed reader will change the way how you consume your daily dose of news. The 3 tips below will highlight how you can easily browse your daily news from your sofa using Google Reader and a big LCD TV.

1. Use custom interface made for easier reading
2. Create folders to categorize your news
3. Use RSS feeds to follow blogs and discussion forums

1. Use custom interface made for easier reading
There is a custom user interface for Wii Console at google.com/reader/wii but obviously you can use this same UI for any computer. I find this interface very user friendly to use with my LCD TV as it renders the text size automatically large enough so that I can read it easily from a distance.

Alternatively, if you are using a normal Google Reader interface at reader.google.com, you can toggle fullscreen by pressing the “u” key. This way it is easier to zoom in the text for reading.

2. Create folders to categorize your news
With Google Reader you can create additional folders where you can drag and drop your RSS feeds. I strongly recommend creating enough folders so that it is later easier to read the news for the specific topic you are interested at that moment.

For example, I have categorized my feeds into the following folders:
Blogs (blogs that I follow)
Discussions (discussion forums I follow)
Economy (economy and business related news sources)
General News (general news about daily events in the world)
Technology (technology specific news sources)

3. Use RSS feeds to follow blogs and discussion forums
As pointed out in tip 2, I have subscribed the RSS feeds from the blogs and discussion forums directly to Google Reader. I find this very useful way to read the new posts in the blogs and forum topics I am interested without browsing each site separately. If you have not done this already I highly recommend this approach. To get started you can subscribe the RSS feed from this blog by copy pasteing this link http://mymediaexperience.com/?feed=rss2 to your Google Reader.

So, to get started go to reader.google.com to subscribe to the free web based service. After creating the account, save google.com/reader/wii as your browser favorite to start reading your daily news.