Feedly - It's like Flipboard for your desktop. Sort of.

What I love about my iPad is that I can pick it up, open my Flipboard app and begin reading from all of the news websites (uh, hum my social media outlets) and ed tech blogs that I have hand picked. The best part is that these websites are arranged as if they were in a magazine or newspaper. Complete with a headlines and images. So, it makes choosing the articles to read a little easier. I'm a visual guy.

I love Flipboard for my iPad. However, I spend 85% of my day behind my desktop and there isn't a desktop version for Flipboard. So I went searching for my own and found Feedly. Feedly works very similar to the way Flipboard does. Once you sync your Google account Feedly takes your existing Google Reader feed and displays it on your desktop in a magazine or newspaper type layout for easy navigation. I use my Google Reader quite a bit, but I'm lazy and I don't like scrolling through an entire post to get to the next article. And just displaying the title isn't good for me. Remember, visual guy here.

Feedly has several options for you to choose how your content is displayed. You can display your content in a magazine style, with titles only, as a mosaic of images, as cards or as the entire article. Your content will be pulled straight from your Google Reader feed so you don't have to start manually migrating all of your websites to Feedly. Don't worry if you don't have a Google Reader feed.  You can start building content directly within Feedly. One downside, is that Feedly doesn't display your social media streams (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) within the layout you choose. It creates a separate sidebar that displays your social media stream. Similar to a widget in your blog.