Google announced some changes it has been making to Google Reader over the past month. These include support for HTML5 HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags. This is helpful for sharing content with friends using mobile devices.

Another new feature is the "not interested" option for Google Reader’s recommended items. This lets you hide these items and let Google get a better idea of the kinds of things you aren’t into so it can make the recommendations better going forward.

"Reader is the kind of application that people keep open in a tab all day," says Google’s Mihai Parparita. "While it’s flattering that our users are so dedicated, we want to make sure that they don’t miss out on any new features and bug fixes that we release. We’ve therefore added a small banner that appears whenever we release a new version. If you’re in the middle of something, you can ignore it (and it’ll go away for a while), but if not, newest and shinier things are just a click away. Incidentally, today we built the 500th version of Reader; over the 5 years that we’ve worked on Reader, that works out to almost two builds a week."

"Finally, we’ve done a few other small things, like the Home view loading faster, and the Send to functionality being less susceptible to being stymied by popup blockers when used with services such as Twitter," notes Parparita.

Google has also made some adjsutments to Reader Play, the visual Google Reader tool the company introduced back before SXSW.