I'm Anti-Google Reader

I love blogs. I love to read them, to visit them. The reason why I frequent my favorites, is that it has its own identity and purpose, even if sometimes content overlaps. When I signed up for Google Reader in November, I had a realization: a lot of a blog's appeal can come from its aesthetic as much as its content.

For example, Geekologie.com.

I love this blog. The writer is hilarious and the things he features are zany and random and all things geeks love. It's a place where I can scroll through a Star Wars tattoo to a man blending an iPad to something useful, like China's newly-discovered "yeti." Reading Geekologie mixed in among posts from Gizmodo and industry blogs, made me lose the purpose that I was reading it for in the first place. Maybe it's just me personally, but I find actually visiting a blog and reading the content in its natural environment can make or break the reader's experience. It's possible to sort with Google Reader and find only Geekologie posts, but doesn't that lose the purpose? Why not just go to the actual blog? At the same time, sometimes formatting and links are lost. As a stickler for readability, I hate to see when formatting is sacrificed. Sometimes Google Reader can take a bad formatting and make it better, but it seems more likely that the original formatting was just fine, and it gets sacrificed for simplicity.

While Google is fantastic at simplifying every aspect of life, this is one thing I'd rather not be simplified. Are there any hardcore Google Reader fans out there that would disagree? What do you think?