Chances are good that because you are reading this blog post you know that Google Reader has been shut down. Several months ago Google announced that they were shutting down a number of different apps and services to focus their people on more productive work. Reader, which has been Google’s RSS feed reader, is one of the apps that has been shut down.

Since Google announced Reader’s demise, several other companies such as Feedly, Digg, and AOL announced and developed alternatives in the hopes the people who have been using Reader will pick their service. Of the services I list above, I chose to use Feedly because it existed prior to Google’s announcement and therefore seems to me to be the most mature.

If you use Google Reader what is important right now is not so much picking one of these services as is saving a backup of your RSS subscription list. Dave Winer has written instructions for how to download a copy of your subscriptions and store them on Dropbox in a place where you can open the file using his new outlining tool called Fargo. You don’t have to do the part about Dropbox and Fargo, athough I personally recommend trying Fargo if you do any writing, but you should at least download your subscription list.

I just checked, and at least for now one still has the ability to download their RSS subscription list using the link that Dave provides.