Of the major news items to hit the internet in the past weeks, the shutting down of Google Reader seems to have hit many journalists, bloggers, and information gatherers pretty hard. Google Reader is a website by which you can collect website subscriptions and view them all in one place. Google Reader is based on a technology called RSS (developed by Dave Winer) that’s pretty much a core feature for many kinds of applications around the web (Facebook newsfeeds, Flipboard, etc. all use RSS or its technologies in whole or part).

With Google Reader shutting down though, its going to become a bit harder for some folks to keep up with those things happening in spaces they pay attention to. I’ve thought about this as it relates to mobile minsitry – which would be described by many as the long-tail of faith-based conversations, mobile, or technology new. Long-tail means that it happens at the edge, and there’s not a great maiinstream media component to it. Those whom are involved in keeping the subject handy are few, and therefore the audience is usually made up of people who go out to find the source, more than news driving them there.

Google Reader has been a key component towards following up on many news bits that make it here. But, I’ve started to take steps to ween myself from there as I look for a better solution that fits my multi-device lifestyle. Part of my solution has been to invent my own RSS reader. That’s something that’s going along well, but I clearly don’t have the coding chops to make Google Reader, so I’m working along the features that I want, and the features that I can build. Doing so had me thinking about the audience here, and what you all might do.

We have this property called MobMin.Info which is a portal page towards those things about mobile minsitry – and it could be updated to point to RSS feeds of the sites featured there, in addition to being more dynamic towards showing the latest articles from those featured sites. Having coded something similar to this on my personal site, I see where it could work, and where it could probably cause a problem for some folks.

And for MMM, we’ve got this HTML5-based, dynamic landing page that does similar. The only real issue there is that it only points to content here, and only to a snippet of the latest posts. It does hav e a working search feature though. That could be something.

Still, that’s solutions made for one person, not a movement. So, the question stands: “how do you keep up with mobile ministry topics?” And what could be done better if you have stopped doing so?

Perhaps there’s an answer out there that doesn’t look like anything proposed,, but gives us all something to look forward to as information and connectivity become even more embedded into how this space evolves.