New Google Reader Feature Tracks Personal Reading Trends

Posted on January 4, 2007

The Official Google Reader blog has announced that addition of a new Google Reader feature called Reader Trends that lets you track how many items you read from the feeds you subscribe to.

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.
If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.

We would like to see how well blogs that have tons of posts each day do. How many of Engadget's or Boing Boing's daily posts do people read? Other information provide by this new Google Reader feature includes how often the feeds you subscribe to are updated and what time of day you read your feeds. Lots more coverage of this subject can be found on Techmeme.