Wednesday, March 13, 2013

How Google Reader Saved My Life

Google Reader is shutting down.

Hey Google, We Still Love Reader

I'm in shock.

This blog is about barefoot running and healthy, paleo-style diets.  These two topics have utterly changed my and my family's life in the past five years.

I learned about the barefoot running movement, like most of us, from Chris McDougall's Born to Run.

I've gotten to know Chris, and Barefoot Ted, ran a race with Caballo Blanco, toured Dan Lieberman's lab, helped design some shoes, and helped some folks fix their diets and change their lives.

I learned about Born to Run from an ad at the bottom of an item in Google Reader.

I clicked the link, watched the video, and at the end Chris put on a pair of Vibram Fivefinger Sprints.  In the three years I'd had my Sprints, this was the only time I'd seen another human being who had a pair.  I immediately bought the book.  Thank God.

Through that book, I learned about the paleo diet from Justin Owings, who sent me a link to this post at Stephan Guyenet's Whole Health Source.  The fact that diet could control dental development (my dental development was seriously impaired growing up) blew my mind, and I started following that blog in Google Reader.  Six months later, I fixed my diet and changed my life.

I had a stroke at 38, a colon resection after coming close to dying from a perforated colon at 40, and I strongly suspect I was getting osteoporosis.  I don't know where I'd be today.  Those problems are gone thanks to what I found by dumb luck through Google Reader.

As I said, I'm in shock.  This is a big step back for the Internet Revolution.

5 comments:

  1. Clicking through from Google Reader...

    I don't remember how I found Born to Run, but I've had Google Reader open in one form or another for a very long time. This shutdown is going to profoundly affect how I learn about the day-to-day world. Having met you through a different Google product, I figured we had a pretty similar set of feeds.

    However, the web is very different than it was a few years ago. Fewer people seem to be contributing much outside of Twitter and Facebook, and what's there is rarely as deep or insightful as my golden-tinged memories of an earlier web. in recent years Reader just hasn't seemed as rich as it once did.

    But still, I'm looking for replacements...

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  2. I look at Twitter (ADD, anyone?) and Facebook (cat pictures) when I'm done with Reader.

    You can't convey useful information through twitter, and Facebook is a vanity site.

    Sigh.

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  3. I'm hoping the functionality will get rolled into Google + in a useful way. When they closed Wave the best parts of the functionality went into Google docs.

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  4. "Google +" and "useful" aren't things that go together in my mind...

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  5. "Google +" and "useful" aren't things that go together in my mind...

    ReplyDelete

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