Google Reader has made my online life so much more pleasant and efficient. I subscribe to about 160 feeds, which drop circa 9,500 items into my lap every month. So now, I type no URLs and I never have to wait for a bookmarked site or blog to download only to discover it hasn’t been updated since my last visit.

Now those nice folks at Google have included a widget that allows users to instantly blog their shared items. Over on the sidebar, there’s a section called “FROM MY READER” which lists the stuff that I thought y’all might find interesting. Sometimes they are nail-on-the-head on-topic; more often they will be oddities that caused a smirk or gave me real pause for thought. Below are a handful of them, updates will appear in the sidebar on an ongoing basis. If you find these useful / smirky / interesting, do drop me a line and let me know.

(Robert Scoble leads the way on this with his Links Blog, I don’t cover a fraction of what he does on a monthly basis, so although Google Reader automatically produces a blog of my shared stuff, I don’t think there’s any need to go that far, but let’s see where it goes …)

Five From My Reader:

• Penelope Trunk, a great writer, on how to be a compelling writer

• A precis of Seth Godin’s The Dip talk by Pamela Slim

• Jessica Hagy on the irrelevance of a high grade point average

• A fabulous post about customer service from Levitt over on Freakonomics

• The Execupundit – Michael Wade – on toxic working relationships