We're all creatures of habit aren't we? Our bad habits hard to break and dragging us down, our good habits carrying us yet going unnoticed. How we use the Internet is likely to bring a few habits of its own. Not to bring up any of the nasty habits that the Internet can foster, let's look at a way our quest for new and useful information can be improved.

Let's say that you're a news junkie, and you like to keep on top of international affairs, politics or science news. You might visit several sites during the day to remain fully informed. Would it be convenient to visit just one website and get all of your news? If you answered "Yes", then read on.

To keep up with the insane increase in the number of blogs (on-line journals) appearing on the Internet, blog reading programs and web sites were born and have flourished as a new way to read on-line information. The group of standards that allow story distribution (called syndication or web feeds by others) have allowed readers to pull together blog posts into one place for quick access. And now, since blogs are not the only type of web sites that use this form of distribution, we can take advantage of the technologies to read many different types of content.

Many of the news sites that feed (no pun intended) your habit might have their own feeds. Look for a little orange "chicklet" icon that looks like a radio signal coming out of a single dot, a link that mentions subscribing, or small images with the letters RSS, XML, RDF or Atom. These most likely indicate the the site you're reading has a feed. Next you will need to choose a reader to pull everything together for you. There are several good web sites available to help you out here including Bloglines.com, Findory.com, Netvibes.com and Rojo.com. There are also PC based applications like NewsGator that do the same trick. I find the web-based readers are better for me because I switch computers often enough during the course of the day and having my reader on just one computer would be inconvenient.

Google also has a site called "Google Reader" (which is usable but still incubating in their "lab") that recently received some upgrades putting it closer to the feature sets of its competitors. Some of the features I like include an easy way to star items that you want to read later and the way it marks stories as read as I scroll past them. There's also the ability to quickly share stories that you read with other people. By clicking the "Share" button under a story, Google Reader adds the story to a list and generates a custom web page with the stories for others read. This page (wouldn't you know it) has a web feed of its own, and you can easily create a clip of the stories for sharing on your own web site by cutting and pasting a little bit of code.

Putting stories in standard formats not only makes it easier for distributing and reading news, but it makes it possible to find, mix and match the stories that you are interested in. Yahoo! for instance lets you build your own news feed based on search terms. Once you subscribe to the feed, Yahoo! does all of the hard work pulling together new items with the words from your query, and you can sit back and watch the stories come in. Visit http://news.yahoo.com/rss and scroll down to the "Create your own RSS news feeds" to give it a try.

So why not try and save some time by using one of the many news readers to get your daily news "fix"? Maybe then your on-line reading won't be cutting into your personal or work hours... or maybe you'll just read more news with all of the time you save?