Use Google Reader to get customized news at your fingertips.

Google has a new tool that makes life a lot easier if you like to keep up on local and other news. It’s called Google Reader and you’ll find it at Google.com/Reader.

Google Reader is meant to be customized, so you’ll need to start by adding "news feeds" to your list before you’ll start getting anything to read. If you want to start with Santa Clarita’s local news, type in "KHTS" and "Daily News Santa Clarita" into the search box, and the system will find these sites for you and add them to your Reader. Unfortunately The Signal doesn’t seem to work with Google Reader yet… that’s apparently because The Signal doesn’t have the right type of technology on its website yet.

You can also add blogs like this one and other news sources like Money, LA Times and more. There is no limit here! Just type in the name of the website and Google will find the links for you - you don’t even need to know the full web address.

To make for easier reading, you may want to sort your news sources into folders. Mine include "Local News", "Real Estate News", "National News" and "Blogs" for starters.

With Google Reader, you’ll be able to see the titles of the news articles from all of your selected sources, sorted in order of the most recent posts first. Clicking on the article title in the list will give you the full article in text format (just keep scrolling down). Click on the blue article title within the short summary box, and you’ll be linked to the site with the original complete article.

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