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January 23, 2008 Blog No Comments

Gain Insight Into Your RSS Feed Reading Habits With Google Reader Trends

Google’s feed reader, Google Reader, is undoubtedly popular among the GTD crowd. One of my favorite features, Google Reader Trends, gets some, but not a lot of attention by the aforementioned. That aside, to avoid cluttering and overwhelming yourself with too much syndicated material (RSS, Atom) to read and comb through, turn to your trusty Google Reader Trends.

Weigh-In for Subscriptions

The most useful part of Google Reader Trends, is that it allows you to truly see what subscriptions you pay attention to, via Reading Trends. More often than not many feeds get neglected and ignored. Reading Trends help evaluate whether or not to remain subscribed. If you lost interest or no longer read it, why subscribe?

(Image Courtesy of Josh Bancroft)

Ease of Use

The nice thing about this feature is that you do not have to activate it or do anything special to get statistics. It is built right in and easily accessible in Google Reader. It can be accessed via the “Trends” link in the left sidebar, or press “g then (Shift) + t” on your keyboard to open the Trends page.

Additional Points to Consider

• Timeline of Reading – Not only does Google Reader Trends offer insight into your reading habit percentages, it also gives you a timeline where you can see statistically what time of the day and days of the week you are doing the most and least reading.
• Subscription Trends – What sites update the most? What about the least?
• Starred and Shared Items – What sites do I consistently share items from?

Thank you for your comments!