I’ve grown addicted to WNYC’s ‘Radiolab‘ podcast. With all the time I’ve spent in the car this summer, Radiolab has been a savior, making five-hour trips seem like 30 minutes. The show is similar to Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, but a little less smug and a little more nerdy.

A recent episode on “Words” is nerdtopia for communicators like me. The one-hour show tries to imagine what the world would be like without words, and investigates how language shapes and structures the way we communicate and interpret the world. From looking at turns of phrase coined by Shakespeare, to following a group of deaf children in Nicaragua who created their own language, to studying how babies’ brains make connections between group of words (it happens later than you think) — I was riveted.

Carve out an hour of your day and take a listen here.

Also check out this cool video produced to accompany the episode. It took me until the second watch to “get it”, but it’s clever and beautifully done:

If you work in PR, you’re likely among the 50,000+ subscribe to Ragan.com’s PR Daily e-mail newsletter (and if you aren’t, you should be). Editor Michael Sebastian and his team put together the best links to PR-related articles and blog posts from around the web each day — with plenty of fun and snarky commentary added, free of charge. I’ve often wondered how he does it, and Michael agreed to give me the inside scoop on how PR Daily happens:

Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in PR.

I worked in journalism—newspapers, magazines, book research—and took a job with Ragan in January 2007 to be part of its maiden Web editorial staff. So, I started covering the corporate communications industry—PR, marketing, internal comms, speechwriting, and the emerging world of social media. (I wrote a weekly column for Ragan about the corporate blogosphere called Blog Dogger—not my choice for the name. I wanted to call it Bloggy Style, but the powers-that-be nixed it.)

I digress.

At nearly the same time, we launched MyRagan.com, which at the time was pretty groundbreaking. It was the first social network for the industry. I was—and continue to be—the managing editor of the site.

In 2008, I started writing Ragan’s PR Junkie blog and the success of that spawned PR Daily, which we began developing in December 2008. It launched in March 2009. The audience is a mix of PR professionals—corporate, agency (big and small), and independent or freelance pros—marketing pros, internal communicators, members of the media professionals, and social media enthusiasts. It’s grown, steadily. We also saw a spike in traffic when we incorporated the share buttons below each item.

How do you go about curating articles for inclusion in PR Daily?

I wouldn’t say it’s a process, more like controlled chaos!

Currently, the site is updated twice daily—at midnight Central Time (when the page turns over from the previous day) and around 9 or 10 a.m. CT. The stuff that goes live at midnight is the previous day’s late breaking news and the evergreen how-to items. The morning update is meant to reflect what’s in the morning papers.

Of course, this news is directly or indirectly related to the PR industry. So, first thing I do each morning is check my e-mail, and I go right for the dozen or so e-mail newsletters I receive. These e-newsletters cover PR and advertising, general news, and gossip. Then I see what the PR Daily contributors have sent. That’s where I start. From there I check The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, then I head over to Twitter to see what’s going on.

The e-mail alerts, the write-ups and heads-ups (is that the plural of “heads-up”? Sounds weird.) from the PR Daily contributors, and what’s in the NYT, WSJ, and on Twitter give me a pretty good feeling for what’s going on. After that I’ll visit some blogs to see their take on things and check if there’s under-the-radar stuff I’ve missed.

As a side note, people often ask if I subscribe to RSS feeds. I do, but I hardly use them. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to remember my RSS passwords. Do they even take passwords? See, that’s how removed I am from RSS. Twitter is my new RSS reader.

What do you look for when determining whether or not an article/post should be included in PR Daily?

The items must have some connection to PR. Of course, one could argue that almost everything has to do with PR—and it’s a valid argument—but if you subscribe to that too closely—as an editor, at least—then next thing you know you’re just scraping the top headlines from the Times and giving it a little topspin. PR Daily readers don’t want that.

In addition to being PR-related, stories should be useful (and by that I’m mainly referring to tip sheets and how-tos), interesting (survey results fit this bill), sexy (company X gets into a PR mess—that kind of thing), or just bizarre—a plum, as we call them—such as, “11 notes written to thieves.” True, that has nothing to do with PR, but damn that one was funny.

You’ve been adding team members recently. What are their roles and how do you manage this growing team?

They [the team] are all remote, so they send me stuff throughout the day, though usually the stuff comes in late at night or early in the morning. If it’s timely, I make sure it runs that day; if they send an evergreen item—you know, 10 tips for Facebook, or something—then I might hold it if things are getting tight that morning.

I’ll also say that when contributors join the PR Daily roster they often grow into more than just writers for the website. For instance, Jackson Wightman—the first PR Daily contributor, and a very funny French Canadian (don’t hold it against him)—just took part in a webinar for PR Daily and he’ll be doing more in the future.

Susan Young, a veteran reporter and PR pro in Dallas, is developing a super-top-secret project for Ragan. Matthew Royse, a man bursting with knowledge and enthusiasm about PR and social media (seriously, this guy loves talking about social media), has worked with Ragan on other projects, too. Recently, we just added Claire Celsi, a PR pro in Des Moines, Iowa, to the roster. She’s a great writer—and prolific, knowledgeable, talented.

Clearly, I’m a fan of the contributors.

The fulltime editorial staff at Ragan is wonderful, too. Roula Amire, the managing editor of Ragan.com, is my rock; Rob Reinalda, the executive editor at Ragan, is my guru; Jessica Levco, Ragan’s healthcare editor, is my comic relief.

All great people to work with.

There are several PR-related daily newsletters (PRSA, SmartBrief on Social Media, etc.). How do you differentiate PR Daily and make it valuable to your audience?

My boss, Mark Ragan, gave me carte blanche to create PR Daily. He trusted my vision and my voice for the project, and he’s supported me in that ever since.

I look at PR Daily as the bastard child of Gawker and Open Forum. News, advice, oddities, trends, humor, and most of all, VOICE. Beside the content, PR Daily has voice.

Reading industry publications—online or off—is important, but it can also feel tedious, like it’s part of your job, like you’d much rather be reading that US Weekly, Elle, or Esquire, but you have to read this industry pub first.

I know PR Daily will never compete with a mainstream pub or gossip blog in terms of peoples’ attentions, but I also want them to look forward to PR—to learn something useful and interesting, laugh, and share it with their friends or network. I also hope it attracts people to an industry publication who may have never read one in the past.

And really, what I’m doing is an extension of the Ragan brand; it’s been approaching industry publications in this manner since the company launched in 1969.

The future is all about growth! We’re expanding to Europe; we’re going to continue to grow staff; we’re going to increase the frequency of the updates on the site; and we’re developing Smartphone and iPad apps.

What big changes do you see on the horizon for PR practitioners in 2010? What is the biggest challenge they will face?

Content. Creation.

This is something my boss, Mark Ragan, was talking about years ago and you’re really seeing it happen now, particularly at larger agencies. The gaping hole left by newsroom cuts–and the new ethos of online journalism (key words, gossip, et cetera)–has given companies a chance to produce news and content.

If the reporters covering an industry are getting laid off–or getting shuffled to other parts of the newsroom–then companies should create their own content. And I don’t mean in press release form. I mean in the same way you’d see an article appear on The Huffington Post, with art, video maybe, and, most of all, voice—and not the stuffy corporate kind. If the content is good, people will visit, say, General Electric’s sponsored news page to read news and opinion. It creates another point of contact with consumers.

And don’t get me wrong, I know critics might toss around the word Orwellian. That’s a valid concern. Last thing we want is for companies to report on news without an independent media validating that stuff. I suppose I see it more in the way professional sports teams kick out content. Head over to any professional team’s website and you’ll find a professional writer/reporter–usually a very talented one–writing articles and curating content about the team.

Anyway, someone’s going to need fill that gap for companies and brands. Why not PR?

I was in Washington, DC, earlier this week to present a workshop at ALI’s “Social Media for Government” conference. A three-hour workshop. While I initially worried about how I was going to fill that much time, it actually went by pretty quickly. I think the 25 students survived, and maybe even learned something.

Since so many conferences feature speakers just using slides and talking at the audience, I wanted to be sure that I got the class involved. It’s easy to talk about social media, but another thing entirely to do it. The first part of the workshop involved splitting the class into groups. I asked each group to find things they had in common and write a collective “Twitter bio” in 160 characters or less that described the group, and also give three hashtags about their group.

The teams stayed together throughout the workshop. I shared some information about how the media landscape is changing and how traditional media and social media are still important. One of the most important strategies for communicating to the media and directly to audiences? Content creation. I gave examples of several organizations that are doing a great job of creating lively, interesting, multimedia content that appeals to mainstream media and to the public – the kind of content that gets written about, linked to, and shared.

Each team was assigned a “content creation channel” – video, podcasting, blogging or microblogging/aggregation. The teams had 25 minutes to create a piece of content about the workshop. I didn’t give too much guidance, I just told them to be creative and stick to their channel. Each group shared their content to a Posterous site I created for the class: http://smgov2010.posterous.com

The results are fun and I think (hope) the class enjoyed getting to do something participatory and creative, versus listening to me ramble on for three hours! My slides from the session are embedded below (and also on the Posterous site):

Social Media continues to be a challenge for many in government, who constantly struggle with complex processes and layers of approvals in order to get anything accomplished (social or not). Earning buy-in is tough, and articulating the value of social media engagement with higher-ups and then gaining enough flexibility to execute social strategies and campaigns outside of traditional, strict oversight rules that exist in most government organizations is still an uphill battle. One organization I spoke with must have every single tweet approved. Seriously.

Still, it was good to see a group of government communicators excited and interested in social media and attempting to figure out how to make it work in their organization. Hopefully I was able to help some of them move a little closer to integrating social media into their communications plans.

I’ve been thinking a lot about differences between national and local media lately. The topic has been the subject of my last two posts over on Newsworthy, the readMedia blog, and I’ve been listening intently at the PR conferences I’ve been attending when journalists take the stage for panel discussions. Some have been representing national media outlets, like Slate.com, USA Today, and The New York Times. Others are local reporters for TV networks, metro daily newspapers or hyperlocal web sites. The differences in what these journalists expect from PR people are stark. But more on that later.

First, let’s talk about why solid, locally focused PR gets very little attention among the PR blogosphere/trade press/twitterati. When’s the last time you’ve seen PR Week highlight a kickass local PR success story? Of course, it’s sexier to talk about big brands with big budgets like Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble or Intel. Their PR and social media campaigns try to reach as broad a consumer audience as possible, sometimes within a vertical, but usually regardless of geography.

With location-based networking (Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla) all the rage and talk of hyperlocal journalism reaching a fever pitch, it surprises me that more attention isn’t being paid to local PR. Why is it that the primary discussions in and about our industry are focused on behemoth national or global brands, or even on smaller brands who are deemed “successful” at public relations by virtue of landing stories in national outlets? Do they have a monopoly on newsworthy content?

Hardly. There are thousands of small businesses and non-profits across the country that are doing a bang up job of telling their stories — to the audience that matters to them! If you’re a local organization focused on recruiting volunteers, publicizing events and providing services to a particular county or town, your public relations strategy had better focus on reaching local audiences. That means pitching local media, reaching out to local bloggers and developing a social media presence that local constituents can find and interact with. A hit in The New York Times is great, but you’re far likelier to move the needle on organizational goals if you focus on the channels that your local audiences use to get information.

In many cases, that still means the local newspaper and TV stations. Social media and alternative media have yet to supplant these traditional outlets locally as a primary source of information (according to Pew). Often new media (like local blogs and citizen journalists) take their cues from what mainstream media is writing about, and much of the information that’s shared in social networks originates in traditional media (Pew estimates over 90 percent).

So, reaching local media is key if geography matters to your organization. And fortunately, local journalists want to get your news. This was the main difference that came up over and over again in the journalist panels I’ve been listening to over the last few weeks. Here’s how it would go:

Well-known journalist from renowned national media outlet: “I hate being bothered. I get 955 emails a day. I probably don’t care about your story. I will never cover your groundbreaking or charity event. If you’re going to pitch me, you should read and research everything I’ve written for the last six months. You should tailor your pitch directly to me, and it had better be the absolute perfect story for my readers, and you’d better be able to convey the entire pitch to me in one or two sentences. Don’t send me press releases. Don’t send me any photos or videos or attachments unless I ask for them. And don’t keep bothering me to see if I got your email, because I probably don’t care.”

Small-town journalist from local TV news station: “I want to know about everything happening in this town, and especially how it affects the people who live and work here. I absolutely will cover a groundbreaking or charity event if it’s local and has an impact on residents. When you send me press releases, make sure they’re well-written and have all the information I need. Extras like photos and other documentation can be helpful. Make sure the title of the email and press release convey the key information I need to know. Be responsive when I call for follow-up information or interviews.”

Slight hyperbole, but that was essentially the gist. National reporters are busy and over-pitched, and they get a lot of bad pitches so they don’t trust press releases. They don’t have time for long pitches. They don’t do reportorial journalism, because they don’t have to. They get so many story ideas pitched to them that they rarely have a hard time filling the “news hole” each day.

On the local side, these journalists are also busy, but they rely on local organizations to help them develop content. They are all about reportorial journalism – the who, what, when, where, why of what’s happening in their town. They rely on press releases and PR people to help them find out what’s interesting and important. They are the 75 percent of journalists who say that receiving high-quality, targeted emailed press releases is helpful! And they don’t want “New! Whiter, brighter toothpaste!” press releases, they want to know about local students who complete a peer education program at an area nonprofit, or about a new program of study being added at a local college.

As much as industry outsiders (and the PR industry itself) love to bash on PR and declare that press releases are dead, it’s simply not true when it comes to local public relations. I see so many readMedia clients send solid, relevant, newsworthy press releases every day to local media, and these releases get picked up and their information ends up in front of their target audience. Shel Holtz said it best: “The role of media relations professionals is to inform journalists of their organizations’ news.”

You can talk about revolutions or evolutions or solutions for public relations in the digital age, and trump up fancy PR campaigns from big brands and continue to chase down national media hits. But let’s not forget that a lot of basic, fundamental media relations tactics are still very effective at the local level. If you’re a local organization, isn’t that where you want to be successful?

It’s been quiet around the blog lately. I’ve been traveling a lot for work (and some for fun) and blogging has taken a back seat. Plus, it seems like I haven’t felt like I’ve had too much to say. I’m resolving to get back on track, though.

Here’s some of what I’ve been up to over the last six weeks:

I guest lectured on social media to a graduate-level PR class at The College of Saint Rose and talked with them about how social media has influenced and changed PR over the last several years. The class is working on a social media strategy for a local non-profit and I gave them some ideas for ways to encourage volunteering and fundraising via content marketing. My slides from the class are below (and they’re pretty bland – I usually try to jazz up presentations more!)

I was a member of a panel of speakers on social media at the 2010 Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership Conference at the NYS Museum. I had never heard of this group before, but it’s fantastic! This national organization has chapters all over the US and brings together 10th graders from different schools for a weekend devoted to leadership and community service. The kids were excited, energetic and inquisitive. For my part of the panel, I talked to them about how social networking is an important component of online reputation management. When they’re applying for jobs or scholarships, people are going to Google them. They need to make sure that their social activity (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other online postings) reflects the type of person they want to show to the world. I also taught them how to Call the Dawgs.

I read Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. I received a copy of the book at last October’s Inbound Marketing Summit, when it was pretty new, but never got around to reading it. I thought it would be interesting to wait to read it until almost a year after it was published and see how well it held up. I’m generally not one to like social media books (or even business books in general). I’ll probably save my observations on the book for another post in the coming weeks.

I flew three round-trips to BWI for conferences about PR in higher education and communications in government. I talked with lots of readMedia clients (and hopefully future clients) about effective ways of reaching hyperlocal media, how to manage enterprise-level PR and communications within complex organizations, and how to ensure social media is baked into PR best practices so that it becomes a natural extension of communications activities. I go back to BWI in two weeks to present a workshop on social media for government communicators. I’m going to be the mayor of that airport in no time.

I finally pulled together a group of smart, hard-working people to help me keep Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley moving forward. The event has grown so much in the last year and was more than I could handle on my own – so I’m now happy to have a team behind me making it happen. We took a break from our typical early morning programming in June and instead hosted a social media happy hour at a local biergarten. Networking was greatly enhanced. We’re looking forward to bringing back regularly scheduled programming in August.

So, this post is a total cop-out, but I plan to be back to blogging (semi) regularly soon. Stay tuned…

I’ll be hitting the road quite a bit this summer attending various communications conferences. A few organizers are even crazy enough to let me speak!

First on the schedule is ALI’s Social Media for Government conference (#smgov) in July in Washington, DC. I’ll be presenting a three-hour (yikes!) pre-conference workshop about “How to blend traditional and non-traditional new media into your government communications plan” on July 12. I plan to share several examples of readMedia clients and other organizations who are successfully adopting modern public relations strategies that incorporate web communications, social media, traditional media relations and multimedia. The rest of the conference kicks off the next day and features a variety of sessions and speakers from local, state and federal government organizations.

If you’re interested in attending the conference, you can save $400 off current registration rates if you sign up by next Thursday, May 20. Click here for more info.

At the end of July, I’m heading to the Windy City to drink good beer with Allan Schoenberg and Mike Pilarz speak at the eduWeb conference about how colleges and universities can generate hyperlocal media coverage in print and online by publicizing student accomplishments in their hometowns. I’ll go over the results of the recent study readMedia conducted that asked editors and publishers of community newspapers for their opinions about hometown news content, and I’ll also discuss how to get more of this content to live online (currently only half of hometown news is published to the web, even though editors say that it’s engaging and important to their audience).

If you work in higher education PR or web communications, you won’t want to miss eduWeb. The schedule is packed and there will be something for everyone. Click here for more info.

Lastly, the Age of Conversation 3 is finally on sale at Amazon! The book is a collaborative effort of more than 171 authors, each contributing an essay on a particular aspect of how to implement social media strategy. All proceeds benefit the Make-a-Wish foundation. You can grab your copy using the widget below:

Where are you headed this summer? What conferences and meetings are on your radar?

So here’s the traditional pecking order of writers: journalists are at the top, those paragons of probing prolixity and unbiased storytelling. Public relations professionals are perhaps a rung lower – still able to craft press releases, articles and pitches that could stand alone as news stories if need be, but always telling the story from the point of view of an organization. At the bottom of the ladder? Sales copywriters. Those feeble hacks who resort to drama, fear and exclamation points to attract an audience. (We’ll leave the poets and novelists alone for now.)

While PR pros are traditionally trained to emulate the journalist when writing, the tables have turned: we need to start writing like sales copywriters. At least in our headlines.

It’s no secret that audiences are bombarded with messages these days, across mediums. Bombarded. We naturally look for ways to parse, sort and filter information to determine what’s important and immediate. In many cases, we do this based on a single line of text: the subject of an email, the post title in our RSS reader, the headline of a press release or news story. You could write the grandest, juiciest, most interesting press release ever, but if a reporter never opens the email, does it really matter?

If a press release falls in the forest…

I’ve been running a lot of email campaigns lately at work and the part that hangs me up like no other is writing the subject line. How can I get customers or prospects to open the email to actually get to the great content I’ve written? At most, I’ve got 40-50 characters to entice them (that’s a third of a tweet, by the way). When blogging, I usually save the post title for last, and often agonize over it. And, when readMedia clients send press releases over our wire, the headline of the release becomes the subject line of the email that reporters receive. A weak subject line means a press release might be deleted before the contents are even known.

Good writing is for naught if you can’t get anyone to read it. We rarely focused on headline writing in journalism school years ago (and writing headlines for print is very different than writing them for the web. So long, puns). We were committed to learning the inverted pyramid and AP style. The focus was on telling the story, and the thought of attracting people to read it was, well, not a thought at all.

A sales copywriter’s singular goal is to get someone to DO something: click a link, give up an email address, buy a product, request more information. Sales copy is compelling – not from a “hey, that’s interesting” perspective, but from a “wow, I need to do that” perspective. Why do magazines like Cosmo and GQ have those ridiculous blurb teasers on the cover? To do exactly that – to tease. To convince people that they have to pick up the magazine and read the article.

I’m not suggesting we should all start adding exclamation signs and dollar symbols and phrases like “Special Offer! Act now!” to our headlines and post titles. But we do need to start giving them some more thought. And we need to be thinking about optimizing our writing for search (Robert Niles even thinks learning SEO should now take precedence over learning AP style in j-schools).

The headline or title can no longer be an afterthought. It needs to be informative AND compelling. We need to be reading Copyblogger and learning how to adapt those sales copywriting techniques to public relations writing (and not feel snide about it).

We need to get people to open up — literally — and get to the good stuff.

I’ve spent this week in Washington, DC at the PRSA Counselors to Higher Education Senior Summit, talking with current readMedia clients and learning about the issues higher ed communicators face. The sessions yesterday were held at the headquarters of USA Today in McLean, Va., and included a panel discussion with three USA Today editors.

I snagged this quick video during the Q&A session, after a participant asked about how to pitch Op-Ed pieces:

There are some great reminders for PR folks: know the outlet you’re pitching and how they operate, be relevant and provocative, and remember that a story idea that doesn’t get picked up the first time around can often be repurposed or repackaged later on.

Last Friday was the sixth installment of Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley, an event that continues to grow and attract smart and interesting people from the area to gather, talk and tweet about social media. I invited Noel Hidalgo and Ken Zalewski from the New York State Senate CIO’s office to share how they’re pulling state government out of the DOS-ages and into the world of participative, open government.

I’m not remotely wonky (at least when it comes to politics), so I wasn’t even sure if I was going to find the breakfast interesting. But, seeing as how Albany is a government town and many of the attendees work in state government, talking about how technology and social media are transforming what’s often thought of (and is) as a slow, stodgy bureaucracy seemed like it might generate some good discussion.

Noel and Ken didn’t disappoint.

I was fascinated during the entire presentation, which was much more technical and talked a lot more about software code and technology policy and a lot less about Facebook and Twitter than previous SMBTV events (which I think is a good thing). Noel shared the three components of open government:

• Transparent: Promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what government is doing.
• Participatory: Should use innovative tools, methods and systems to cooperate among themselves. Should also solicit public input for how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation.
• Collaborative: Actively engages New Yorkers in the work of their government.

In the New York State Senate, Noel and his team are working to make sure that all legislators have access to the same tools and can use technology to engage in two-way dialogue with constituents about important issues. They are using open-source software like Drupal to rebuild constituent management systems and open up data so that citizens can create applications to access information about their government.

The New York State Senate is the first state house to adopt Creative Commons license for all content it produces. Through the Open Legislation platform, all bills since 2009 are now online and searchable, and anyone can create applications that access information in this database – one resident developed an SMS short code app where anyone can text message a bill number and receive information back about the bill.

The presentation, held in the very cool EMPAC at Rensselaer building in Troy, was recorded and livestreamed by Annemarie Lanesey of MZA Multimedia:

If you’re even remotely interested in how governments can and are using technology to more effectively reach citizens, I’d encourage you to watch the presentation. If you’re not, watch it anyway – I didn’t think I would be interested either!

Thanks again to Noel and Ken for speaking, and to EMPAC and their fantastic staff for hosting SMBTV 6.

I want to like Delicious, I really do. I’ve been using it to trap links of interest for a while now, and as someone who’s probably used 10 different computers regularly in the last few years, it seemed a handy way to store content I want to access again later, from anywhere. I installed the Delicious extension in Chrome recently and that made it easier and more likely that I’d share and tag links.

But my days with Delicious are over.

The social networks that have stood the test of time so far (“time” in Internet world meaning more than a year or two) have constantly added functionality, features and new design. Facebook does it every few months, it seems. Delicious, for whatever reason, never seemed to graduate into a really robust, useful platform for people to share and save content. It was hard (nearly impossible) to import and find friends, the interface was ugly and clumsy, and search was frustrating. It earned the moniker “Where links go to die” and that’s not too far from the truth, in my case.

It’s too late for Delicious. Google Reader has completely lapped it.

Google Reader started as a way to keep track of blog feeds, and I didn’t use it much beyond that. But then they began rolling out more useful features. You can tag and star items and organize feeds into folders. Then Google rolled out the “Share” function, which, with one click, allows you to post to your own public feed any item from your reader you wished. Google added the ability to find and follow friends via Google Reader and see, right from within your reader, what they are sharing. You can add notes and comments on items or send an item to someone via eMail. And let’s not forget the nifty ‘Trends’ stats feature (this is Google, after all) that shows you which feeds you’re most engaged with. (The official Google Reader blog is a great resource on all these features.)

For a long time, the only thing that kept me saving items to Delicious was the concept of “discovery.” Anything I wanted to save, share or tag in Google Reader was limited to feeds I was already subscribed to. If I happened across something on the Web or clicked to a link from Twitter, I didn’t have a good way to get it into my reader. Plus, I often found a single post interesting and bookmark-worthy, but had no desire to subscribe to the entire blog.

So, it was a two-party system for me: Google Reader to share and save the most interesting posts from among the feeds I already subscribed to, and Delicious for tagging and saving sites I randomly “found” out on the Web.

But it doesn’t have to be this way!

Google Reader has a “Note in Reader” bookmarklet! It does! And it has for two years! Drag the bookmarklet onto your browser’s toolbar, and wave goodbye to Delicious. The bookmarklet lets you save and/or share anything you find on the Web into your Google Reader. You can add notes and comments, just like you would on a blog post. I don’t know how I missed this feature, but to me, it pretty much means the end of Delicious.

The “Note in Reader” feature completes the content consumption round trip for me. Using Google Reader I can:

• Subscribe to a blog or Web site’s feed to receive all its content
• Arrange and sort feeds into folders and bundles
• Star, tag, like, annotate and share specific items from those feeds to my own public “shared items” feed
• Find and follow friends via my GMail contacts or other social networks, or even search for people via keyword or location, and then see and subscribe to items they are sharing
• View recommendations for new feeds that Google generates by comparing my interests with feeds of users similar to me
• Share and save content into my Google Reader from anywhere on the Web I happen to find it

I haven’t tinkered with Google Buzz much, but obviously Reader and Buzz are easily integrated so you can share items across that platform, too.

(I’m not even going to get started on Google Reader Play, which is possibly the biggest time suck I’ve ever seen – it curates and presents fun and interesting information from the Web it thinks I may like into a visual slideshow type of format and lets you share, like and save right from the screen. I’m talking hours lost here discovering fun stuff.)

So I’m sorry Delicious. I can’t even say that it was fun while it lasted, because it was always a bit cumbersome. It’s too bad we have to part ways, but with “Note in Reader” and all the other amazing options Google Reader offers, can you blame me?

Check out what I’m reading, saving and sharing via Google Reader here.