When I looked at Google Reader this morning, I saw a link called "trends" on my homepage. I hadn't seen it before, so I clicked and found myself on a dashboard page showing my usage statistics. (I don't know if this link only works if you are me, or if anyone can see it.)
This seems really cool. I can see at a glance what I've read most over the past 30 days, and which of my subscription blogs have updated the most frequently in the past 30 days. (The top 5 are the same in both lists: Books Inq. is top and Deblog conversation is next -- but these are blogs with lots of posts on them, blogs that have fewer posts will not show up on this type of statistic.) You can also see at a glance the top (bottom?) ten inactive blogs, which is certainly useful when you have a lot of subscriptions and haven't noticed when one or a few have stopped posting for a year.
There are other features on the dashboard, such as a tag cloud of my subscriptions, ability to see more blogs in the "read" and "updated" lists, and a histogram of the number of items I have read over the past 30 days (or longer).
Maybe this is more spooky than cool, I don't know. It was a bit of a shock to see my reading patterns laid bare, and the potential for time-wasting by looking into all the details and fiddling around with my subscriptions is definitely there. But on balance, for me, cool factor wins. I'm glad I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader for this and various other "usability" reasons. I also worked out how to export my GR subscriptions into the Petrona blogroll, which for me was not easy, but after I'd done it the other weekend, I felt I'd learnt something.
Later addition: I apologise to James Long, who had earlier pointed out Google Reader trends to me, via an article I posted on Librarian's Place. I blame my neuronal degeneration, but that's no excuse really. Belated thanks to James, who has also kindly explained to me lots of other nice things you can do with GR trends.
My problem with this, though, is that there can be no distinction between posts you actually read and those you skim through. I actually read a pretty small percentage of the posts that come through my reader, I'm afraid: the ability to slide through them with GR makes that all the easier. I know there's no way for GR to know what I actually read, of course, but for me the statistics don't mean much.
Posted by: Debra Hamel | 13 February 2007 at 15:03