Periscope concentrates on mainstream online news portals and sites like BBC News, the Wallstreet Journal, the Guardian, Business Week or the Washington Post. This means that it is best suited for Internet users who regularly read news on at least one of those online news sites. If you favor independent sites, smaller newspapers or niche sites then you won’t find much use in the extension as it does not provide links to related news posts in this case. The available site pool exceeds 10,000 according to the developers.

After you have installed the extension in your favorite browser, or installed an app for your phone, you will see a news bar at the top of supported news portals that links to related articles.

The toolbar displays the news magazine or site name only, and not the actual title of the related article that you will find on that site. That’s an oversight as you may run into the same article or an unrelated article on another site.

You can however expand the toolbar to display additional news sources and images on the screen. It can take a few moments before the toolbar is displayed on a page. This should not be a big usability issue considering that most users will start reading the news on the original site first before they start being interested in additional coverage.

Internet users who do not want to install an extension for that, can access the database of sites on the News360 website as well.

Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari users find download links on the official website. Everyone else finds links to the mobile app versions of the application and the web based version there as well.

But when it comes to feeds no such thing existed. You could visit the website whenever a new feed would be published, copy the url and paste it into some translation service but that was not very practicable especially for large websites with lots of news updates.

The Google Reader team implemented Google Translate into Google Reader which is now available for anyone to use. That should get rid of most of the hassle. It’s actually pretty easy and straightforward to use. Lets take the Genbeta feed for instance. Genbeta is a Spanish news site that covers Internet news. They sometimes have great news stories which anyone who does not speak Spanish or a related language does not understand. So it was all about the links and titles that they posted until now.

Now it is possible to select automatic translation of the website’s contents into the user’s language. All that needs to be done for this to happen is to click on the Feed Settings button in the upper right corner of the Google Reader screen and to check the Translate Into My Language entry.

The RSS news feed will be automatically reloaded and translated into the default language of the user if that is possible. Google Translate does not support all language translations which might mean that you could be stuck with translating a feed into English instead of your own language.

One option that has become popular in recent months is to create pdf documents out of RSS News Feeds which solves the accessibility problem. Tabbloid is a relatively new Internet service that can turn RSS News Feeds into pdf documents and send those news digest right to the user’s inbox.

This is done by pasting RSS News Feed urls into the form on the main Tabbloid website. The service will check the feed, display a preview of the last news items that have been posted and ask the user to accept or reject it. If the user accepts the feed it gets added to the list of feeds that will be processed.

It is possible to add multiple feeds which would then all be used to fill the pdf document. Options exist to generate the pdf right at the website or set delivery options to receive the pdf document in the inbox. The possible intervals are hourly, daily or weekly.

The created pdf document of the RSS news feeds will look like pretty much like a newspaper. It will not contain images however, only the text and additional information like links. It is therefor easy to load the article on the website directly to post a comment or read it there to see pictures that have been posted.

The pdf documents do not contain advertisement and registration is not required to receive the magazine style RSS News Feeds. The email account has to be verified before the delivery starts.

The only way to enable alphabetically sorting again was to create new folders and add the feeds to them. New folders sort the items alphabetically by default.

A comment by Fernando mentioned that Google added a new Options links beneath the feed list next to Manage Subscriptions in Google Reader that makes it possible to select the default method of sorting the feeds. The option can be set to “alphabetical” or “my order”. Selecting alphabetical will sort all feeds alphabetical again. One interesting aspect of the choice is that users who choose alphabetical will not be able to move feeds around in the same folder in Google Reader. It is still possible to move them to another folder though.

If alphabetical has been selected as the default sorting option then the feed items will stay alphabetical in their folder and new items will automatically assume the correct alphabetical position in the folder that they are moved into.

This finally gives everyone who was frantically looking for a way to enable alphabetical sorting in Google Reader a way to enable it again.

The first thing that I was frantically searching for was a way to sort the subscriptions alphabetically in Google Reader. After searching through all settings and various Internet search engines I came up with nothing. Yes, that’s right. There is no way to sort the subscriptions automatically in Google Reader.

The only thing that you can do is drag and drop them around so that they are listed in alphabetical order. Imagine doing that with 200+ RSS News Feeds. That would take a while. Most users probably import their first batch of RSS News Feeds using an OPML file which could be sorted alphabetically.

Every new entry to Google Reader on the other hand is added at the bottom after each folder and existing subscription which means it has to be manually dragged and dropped into the right location.

I was recently looking for one specific feed that I subscribed to and it took me almost a minute to locate it because the subscribed feeds could not be sorted properly.

Exporting and importing the RSS News Feeds does not help either unless they would be imported into an application that provides access to a “sort” function that can sort the feeds alphabetically. That would on the other hand be much work and something that had to be done regularly.