I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a month ago and I’ve not turned back. While it did take a little getting used to I quickly found a new rhythm of blogging and am not right at home with it.
Today on the Google Reader blog they announced a new feature – Reader Trends which analyses the way you interact with your RSS feeds.
For example on mine it tells me that I have 632 subscriptions and over the last month have read 15,939 items (scary considering I took a week off in the last month).
It also shows me how many I read each day over the last month
Guess who took a week off over Christmas!
I also tracks when I read most of my feeds by time
I bet that graph has changed since having a baby. A year ago there would have been a lot more early morning surfing and then a complete lull until about mid morning.
When I read my feeds by day of the week
Interesting again – Mondays I tend to set aside for writing – Fridays are always a big day for me of blogging as I get ready for a quiet weekend.
Then it goes on to show me which feeds I read most and which were the most frequently updated and the most inactive either as top 10′s, 20′s or 40′s.
It also gives you stats over how many items you ‘star’ and ‘share’ (items I don’t yet use) as well as on tags.
All in all it’s probably more about fun than function – although it does illustrate just how much I use RSS in my blogging and is definitely going to help me cull some inactive feeds from those I’m ‘following’.
Update: One stat I would like to see is a tracking of which blogs I regularly clicked through to actually visit.
I’ll also be interested to see if they aggregate this information from all users to create some sort of a Digg like ‘hot list’.
About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
Google Reader is what I use, if I am using anything.
I wish it had a built in way to blog from the reader. That would make it even better.
I hadn’t realized they added this. That’s very helpful thanks.
We need one of this also in Gmail. This tools are very important to help us manage our limited time resources. Or else, to manage the overload of information we get everydays and our focus on subjects.
I am not an expert here but I have looked at the google reader and it seems pretty cool. Saying that I am still keen on netvibes.
Just wondered if you had considered it, for me it is fantastic it is my home page these days. Is it worth changing to from Netvibes?
I am still using bloglines and have signed up with Google Reader. Why is it you like Google Reader more? Just curious?
On my windows machine I like that Bloglines is right there in my tray and I can click on it anytime to read feeds. Can I do that with Google Reader?
You have 632 subscriptions? I have trouble enough with the 30 odd that I read! I had just been looking at this new feature, then when I went through to my Google homepage and saw this article listed I clicked through to read up what your thoughts were. I like using the Google reader, though I do still use Bloglines as well.
This new feature may well become even more useful over time, tracking of which blogs you actually visit would indeed be a nice addition. I look forward to seeing what they do with this.
See, that’s the kind of information I do not want to know. That would scare the eebee jeebees out of me.
Interesting features. I love that extra kind of stuff. I’m using Sage now on FireFox but I think I’ll make the switch.