Every public relations or marketing professional reads and follows blogs within the industry (or they should). It can get pretty tedious to have a running bookmark list to go through every day/week to stay up-to-date. As a busy professional with a never-ending to-do list, finding time to sit down and read industry publications can be a challenge, particularly when they’re scattered all over the web. An easy solution to this is Google Reader, which constantly checks your  favorite websites and blogs through their RSS feeds for new content and then displays it all in one space. It’s a great service, but the display is clunky and reminiscent of most email providers.

Snorefest, right? Well, there is an app out there to save us from this ugly RSS display.

Check it out:

I give you Feedly! It runs via your Google Reader account but displays it in a much more friendly format. You can divvy up the sites/blogs that you follow into their respective categories. For example, I have a social media tab, which includes Inside Facebook and Social Media Graphics, along with other tabs, including public relations, small business advice, book clubs, fashion and food. Be on the lookout for a post on my favorite blogs in the near future.

The best thing about Feedly besides its clean, minimal design and easy organization is the Feedly toolbar, which really looks nothing like the toolbars we’re used to. It’s a transparent Feedly logo in the bottom right corner of every browser screen, which when clicked allows you to add that site to your Feedly account or share the site via almost every popular form of social media. You can also disable the transparent logo if it bugs you, and just have one up above next to the URL bar.

Don’t know where to begin? Fear not, for Feedly has awesome search capability. Type in your interests and Feedly spits out a list of popular blogs on the topic. Or type in .bookmarks into the explore search box and Feedly will pull the sites from your already bookmarked lists for you to add in one fell swoop instead of page by page.

If you’re a public relations person, or really any person, who likes to read blogs and wants a one-stop beautiful shop to do it in, download Feedly now! The only drawback is that it only runs in Firefox, Chrome or Safari (beta). Happy reading. 🙂