Is Google Reader really slow to refresh feeds?

Anybody have any idea why my blog posts are taking so long to show up in Google Reader? It took about 5 hours yesterday for a couple of my posts to show up. This morning for instance I made a couple of hours ago. It shows up in Bloglines, but still nothing in Google Reader.

And also, I think that posts I make on WordPress (at screencasters.wordpress.com) come into GReader a lot quicker too. You’d think that since Blogger and Greader are both Google, they’d have them working well together.

I’d be interested in hearing from other Google Reader users. How long do you have to wait until your posts show up in GReader?

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Half the Geek

Whoa! I guess I’m not half the geek I thought I was. Scoble posts his top 35 favourite feeds of the month.

I read only three of those 35 (Digg, Lifehacker and Thomas Hawk).

I dropped Engadget a fairly long time back. Too many posts, too little interest.

Boingboing boinged it’s way off my feed list about 9 months ago. Too many posts, and a little too weird. Sport jacket made entirely of meat anyone?

All things ‘crunch‘ – I grew very tired of web2.0 startup news. I am finding this area of news more pretentious and less interesting every day – and it’s not just Mike. But hey, that’s just me. When Steve Gillmor closed the circus tent, I started losing interest – quickly.

Actually, I’m finding that that there are so many good and interesting relatively low-traffic blogs grabbing my interest that they are slowly but surely shoving aside many of the incumbents in my feed reader.

The old guard had better watch out.

Ok Scoble, but what about search feeds and starred posts?

I was watching this video of Robert Scoble discussing his feed reading system. I found it quite interesting and Scoble, as always, seems so honest and enthusiastic about what he does. You can tell he really loves it. Nice.

Of course there were snippets that undoubtedly would rile up some segment of small struggling tech bloggers, like scanning the headings and bylines for authors he knows and relegating ones he doesn’t to the trash. There was also his mention of how he finds the small guys by paying attention to what the ‘A-List’ bloggers link to. Not exactly what “Joe Smith” was wanting to hear I imagine.

But one thing I didn’t hear Robert mention was search feeds. I know that I have several Technorati and Google Blogsearch result feeds that give me posts that I would completely miss otherwise. I’ve found many new and wonderful blogs that way. I’ve got search feeds for things like ‘Inkscape’, ‘Vim’, ‘wxPython’ and some others. I’ve also used Chris Pirillo’s gada.be engine (now called tagjag it seems) to good effect as well.

So why wouldn’t Scoble use a Technorati feed with the term ‘tablet pc’?

Sure these blog search feeds do generate a fair amount of noise, but it’s fairly easy to sift through, and like I say, you can find some gems that you’d have otherwise missed. The other benefit is that they’re transient. I can delete, or modify those search result feeds as my short term interests change (which they do all the time it seems).

So the questions go out to Robert and everyone else, do you use Feed searches? If so, what blog search engine do you use? And how do you use them?

ps – I’m also a huge fan of the ‘starred post’ feature in Google Reader. I use this as a rudimentary rating system so that I can quickly scan feeds and mark off interesting ones for later reading (I don’t have all day to read these things) so it’s nice to be able to keep track with something easier and far more efficient than something like say, del.icio.us .

Google Reader Acting Up?

Is it just me or has Google Reader been notoriously buggy as of late? I’ve had numerous red ‘Oops…’ messages, feed lists that don’t load first time around, and general buggy-ness over the past several days.

Perhaps some growing pains?