Brian Blogs the Internet, take two.

If you checked out this blog within the first few days of its launch, you'd have noticed the "Brian Blogs the Internet" sidebar where I posted links to websites I enjoyed. When you clicked on a link, it brought you to a separate blog that would link to a website I enjoyed.

That blog was essentially a "link farm," meaning it had no original content of its own. In my humble opinion, link farms are bad for the internet. They are essentially middle men. They operate like a door-to-door salesman, getting in the way.

So here's my dilemma: I do want to share good websites! I read my Google Reader religiously and I want to share my favorites. But if I post links and websites here, it'll clutter up my blog. I assume you, my readers, are interested in me, not other websites. If this blog became 50% links, 50% Brian info, it would no longer be my personal blog.

My solution is to use Google Reader's "share" feature. I can simply choose to share articles I enjoy and Google will automatically create a "Shared Items" blog for me.

You can see this at <http://www.google.com/reader/shared/01179481704014780557>. To simplify things, I've added an updating list on the right side of this blog (under my status updates). It displays the headlines of the last five things I shared, along with a link to "read more" of my shared items.

This way, you can ignore them if you're not interested. But if you're interested in what's going on in the world of technology and the internet, you can see what I recommended. You can even subscribe to the website if you're using an RSS feed reader like Google Reader. I've described this previously.

I'll occasionally post a link roundup with the best of the lot. That way, you'll get a personal recommendation behind good posts.

If you've got a better idea on how to handle this kind of thing, let me know in the comments. If you've started using Google Reader because of my post about it, let me know your shared items page! To the comments! (this means you, Nicole)

P.S.: Alicia's got a shared page, too. She shares a ton of items.