http://www.google.com/reader/view/?page=trends
It's new, and it's really cool :-D

There are my own statistics, blurred by Haochi ^^
http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/3930/eju2.gif

schweet. Now this is kewl. I already deleted 2 subscriptions that have been inactive since mid-2006. They were lost in my 173 total subscriptions.

You use it a lot more than me :-)
Just quickly though, Google Blogoscoped 110 posts in the last 30 days, 100% of which I've read (Or at least flicked past). With an average of 3.7 posts per day. And I seem to be using Google Reader between 6pm and Midnight, for some reason on Thursdays around three times as any of the others. I have 13 subscriptions with 510 read (usually flicked through) Items.

OK there is a post on official blog now
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-like-big-charts-and-i-cannot-lie.html
Thank you Mihai, you & your team did a real excellent job!

PS : Hé hé, you read Valleywag too? ;-)
http://bp3.blogger.com/_QriD2y6VZ-Y/RZsZS-TrGiI/AAAAAAAAAAU/hCisEniR2lk/s400/trends2.png

wow, very slick!

Turns out I read NTY Business the most and Star Google News – India the most!

Anyone else want to share their Greader Trends?

http://pacificdave.com/blog/2007/01/03/google-reader-trends-i-love-charts/

This could be quite interesting...

" 24 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,771 items"
http://picasaweb.google.com/topdawgnate/Web/photo#5016047503346180770

Mrrix32, I also have a huge jump on Thursdays. I wonder if that is a bug.

http://andrewhitchcock.org/images/grtrends.png

You can recognize the Google Reader addicts as they read 100% of their feeds :-D

PACIFICDAVE > Do you read really your feeds or do you read only the titles with the collapsed mode?

BTW, here are my (other) trends :
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/3237/statsreadertomhtml2bc5.jpg

You people have so many subscriptions, I have only 38
http://picasaweb.google.com/hjr.photo/GoogleStuffz/photo#5016110486378945442

Guess my reading list is very young... ;)

<< You can recognize the Google Reader addicts as they read 100% of their feeds. >>

I think it depends if you use the list view or the expanded view.

<<You can recognize the Google Reader addicts as they read 100% of their feeds :-D>>
All you have do do is scroll past them in "Expanded View" for them to be counted as read, I usually go past each one so I know it's not new next time I visit Google Reader.

I *read* all the items, in the expanded view.

Inferno > if you don't have a news-blog to maintain up to date, read many feeds isn't a necessary ;-)

TOMHTML: The only time I read in collapsed mode is when I'm overwhelmed with fark and headlines. That usually takes about 3 days. Other wise it's all expanded. Sick huh? I really didn't realize I was doing this. I'm going to start deleting feeds now.... :-P

I use "Expanded View" so that I can read the title and perhaps one or two lines of the feed item. If it doesn't interest me, I hit the "J" key to get the next item. The obviously problem with these trends is that all those waste-of-time posts still show up as being read, so my stats are seriously inaccurate.

I wonder... will Google ever use these stats to help calculate PageRank for blogs (and other sites with feeds)?

Some online readers (e.g., Bloglines) inform you how many readers you have in their user-agent string. Bloglines does it this way: "Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 4 subscribers)".

Of course, there's no way to know how many of these subscribers are actually reading the feed, or even using their bloglines account anymore for that matter, but it's a useful number anyway.

It would be really simple for Google Reader to do this when it slurps a site. Maybe we can petition?

My stats:

<< From your 140 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,963 items ... >>

http://ruscoe.net/blog/uploads/google-reader-trends-200701.png

Maybe it's just me, but I don't get the RSS Reader phenomenon. I used SharpReader when RSS first began to get popular, and after a while I used Google Reader.

Neither one has really tickled my fancy. I see a lot of things in Google Reader that are leaps and bounds ahead of when I first started RSSing, but, correct me if I'm wrong, Reader is just a way to not have to visit the websites anymore.

Well...I LIKE going to the websites. Each one has their own feel that you get accustomed to. That's part of the allure of the web. What am I missing with this whole feed movement? Can anyone give me a quick overview of how Google Reader makes their lives easier? I see the time-saving factor involved, but the Bookmarks Toolbar gets you to where you wanna be pretty fast...if you're into that sort of thing. I like my standard buttons, the address bar and the Google Toolbar. Anyway, I'm drifting...

Can someone help me understand what you all seem to love so much?

Richard,

If you like to visit sites a lot, you may want to try the "next" bookmarklet feature that Reader has (see the "Goodies" tab under settings). It lets you move from item to item in your browser, based on your Reader subscriptions and their unread items. This means that you still get to see layouts, comments, etc. but you don't have to keep track of what you read or where to go next, Reader does that for you.

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

I was always wondering was that bookmarklet feature did Mihai!

The stats are great, but for some reason I haven't read 100% of all my feeds even though I read in Expanded View and use the 'j' shortcut. Maybe when you scroll through them using the wheel some are not picked up.

Anyway good new feature, hope you continue to work on it.

Is there a way to jump just to unread items in a feed? I sometimes browse the List View and then jump to the Expanded View from the middle of the feed. If I come back to it latter in, the read and unread still show up together when scrolling.

Tony

Yes, I noticed this feature today.

I click on it and it took me here: http://www.google.com/reader/next?go=noitems

Then it took me here:
http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

Funny. I understand what it really does. I just happened to go to Google Reader today and read through all my feeds, so there was nothing else to read. But, I see what it does now that I have a few new feeds in. In this case, why not just use my bookmarks? I'm not gonna forget what I've read and what I haven't been to yet.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be difficult, I just don't get it. I'm gonna give RSS another shot, and you can bet I'll be using GR, but I'm not quite sure what this is doing for me.

Thank you so much for your response.

Mister Parparita, maybe you could use these statistics to publish stats about feeds and their readers. Example: how many people (in %) read their feeds everyday, or how many feeds (in %) aren't updated since one month or more... something like that. And maybe you could reveal how many users use Google Reader... :-D Or it's an official order from your bosses to not reveal that?
It could be cool, and theses stats (or, at least, the stats of the users in this thread) could help me to know if I'm really a Google Reader addict, or if I'm just an average reader :-)

Say you read 10 blogs if you want to check whether there has been an update manually then you have to visit 10 sites. RSS is about pushing the content at you – rather than you going to fetch it. You log into one area (Google Reader, Bloglines, Whatever...) and all of your favourite blogs' latest items are there ready for you to read. It is faster than you going to check each one. Much faster. And you never miss a story.

One feature I would like on Google Reader that may be already implemented (I cant quite work it out) is an RSS feed of my RSS river. Then when I switch readers (which I do want to do – to the widget/module/gadget on Netvibes) I can get them all coming in, in a river still. Any ideas?

TonyB said:

<< Is there a way to jump just to unread items in a feed? >>

Can't you just view new items using the [show only new] link?

Sam Davyson said:

<< One feature I would like on Google Reader that may be already implemented (I cant quite work it out) is an RSS feed of my RSS river. >>

How about adding a folder/tag/label to all your subscriptions and getting a feed for them that way? (I think you need to make the label public to do this though...)

Hello Mihai, since i see you're reading this, is there a chance you will make tag renaming possible? A lot of people want it :) Btw here are my stats :)
http://teodorfilimon.com/files/Reader-Trends_Last_30_days.jpg
http://teodorfilimon.com/files/Reader-Trends_Time_of_day.jpg
http://teodorfilimon.com/files/Reader-Trends_Day_of_the_week.jpg

here is mine

http://static.zooomr.com/images/604784_04357adb57_o.jpg

Sam D said:

<<Say you read 10 blogs if you want to check whether there has been an update manually then you have to visit 10 sites. RSS is about pushing the content at you – rather than you going to fetch it. You log into one area (Google Reader, Bloglines, Whatever...) and all of your favourite blogs' latest items are there ready for you to read. It is faster than you going to check each one. Much faster. And you never miss a story.>>

I am beginning to understand now that this is primarily for blogs...sort of. I go to a certain forum and the feed works for that. But I go to another certain forum, and I don't see the feed for that. I think that's what's been keeping me away from it. I've been trying to use it beyond what it was intended to be used for.

Sam D said:

<<One feature I would like on Google Reader that may be already implemented (I cant quite work it out) is an RSS feed of my RSS river. Then when I switch readers (which I do want to do – to the widget/module/gadget on Netvibes) I can get them all coming in, in a river still. Any ideas?>>

Maybe this will help?
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/12/using-google-desktop-as-google-reader.html

Scott Moonen, I think that's a great idea. Mihai has already showed up, so I'm assuming that he's noting all the suggstions in the comments, plus Philipp's ideas at the bottom of his post.

Philipp, how do you read feeds?

Yes that's a good idea Scott (didn't see it at first..) Similar stats from the Blogger point of view would be great too.

Late to the party, mine is here:
img404.imageshack.us/img404/4029/googlereader7ul8.png

<<From your 91 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,026 items, starred 14 items, and shared 1 items.>>

Wow! That bookmarklet thing is cool. I didn't realise what it did till you just explained it above.

Although I still dont understand why it goes to the main website and not to the individual blog entry.

Doesn't FF provide a 'bokmarklet', so to speak, in the address bar when a feed is found?

Proof that I actually did take a long overdue two week break from the Internet =)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/165/345885841_dc37b864ff_o.png

To get the most out of these statistics, you really have to use the list view in Google Reader and only click on the topics you are interested in. I typically just cycle through every single item with the j key, which will show up as me having "read" every single item. It would be more interesting to see which links I actually click on.

> Philipp, how do you read feeds?

Good question. I don't use any RSS reader at all. However...
- This page aggregates all Google blogs (and more): http://blogoscoped.com/google/ Whenever it updates, I get an alert to my Gmail inbox, which is then moved to a "tracker" label box
- Needless to say lots of tipsters use RSS readers, and send me their tips (thankfully!)

I did play around with different feed readers, including one homemade approach at http://www.feeeds.com/search-temp.html (cached, the dynamic page at feeds.com/search/ is slow right now), but somehow it never stuck with me.

There are so many ways to find information these days. Just thinking about all the aggretators you can subscribe to for a specific keyword like "google" makes your head spin – Google News, Delicious, findory, Technorati, Google Blog search, and dozens more. In the end I guess we always abandon strategies that have a too low signal-to-noise ratio, but I think that's a dynamic process and you always need to adjust to new strategies. For example, at this time searching for "google" in Digg's upcoming stories returns about 1 gem out of 50 submissions or so, a good ratio (you can quickly scan over the dupes), but I don't know if that will be the ratio another year from now.

Part of signal-to-noise is the issue of redundancy. Let's say there are 100 great search blogs worth reading. Reading just 1 of them, you get maybe 60% of the search news you look for. Reading 2 of them, you get 80%, which is a huge increase. Reading 3 gives you 85%, and so on, meaning the redundancy of stories you saw already that morning increases, the "signal" gets weaker... even when we assume all the search blogs are of the same quality, if you're at the 8th search blog you'll start getting a headache and no more blogworthy stories! The overlap however from *Google News* to *reading ~4 search blogs* to *checking Digg* to *talking with people at a conference* etc. is rather low – the more diverse the input, the less redundancy, the more signal.

In fact I think there's no end to how diverse the source can be. Ironically a computer magazine from 1977 might hold more "signal" if you blog about technology than a computer magazine from 2007 does. With very diverse sources, all you need to do is "map" this back on your "topic plane"... Salvador Dali's "Paranoid Critical Transformation Method" comes to mind http://library.humboldt.edu/art/Artists/Dali_Salvador/Dali_Paranoid_Critical_Transformation.htm (it incidentally mirrors a programmer's mindset a lot – "multiple images within the same configuration"... your basic IF-ELSE-clause!). Or you use the input to help you extrapolate (if computers were so stupid 30 years ago, and they're so smart today, how much smarter will they be 30 years into the future? And wow what kind of power is available to us today?!).

And now I'm straying way off-topic... this whole topic fascinates me!

Surprisingly inspiring post, Phillip! Well done.

>> And now I'm straying way off-topic... this whole topic fascinates me! <<

Allow me to get it back on topic.

Where's the link going to be for the Reader Trends page, once the "New!" link gets taken off the Home page?

I think there should be the very basic stats on the Home page, then you click "view more..." to go to the Trends page.

Having just used the Google Reader Trends "Inactive" table to prune my subscriptions, I realised how many of the feeds I subscribed to were dead – or in some cases the blog owners had just moved their feeds! (Bad, bad bad...)

Anyway, it would be great if Google Reader could show me which of my feeds they had problems retrieving or couldn't be found so that I could choose whether to remove them or go hunting for the feed again.

Mihai, stats are good..but when are you guys going to make life easier for us ?? Since Reader does not support search (yes, you know that too). why cant we search starred items eh ??

come on folks.. trending is kewl.. but search is kewler.. who cares what my stats are eh ?? I am not into ego feeding myself.. I need to chunk down infonuggets and then be able to access this fast. No amount of trending/stats makes this issue go away!!

Am I the only one not really very impressed by Trender ??

/pd, that's not a new feature. Mihai had an idea and implemented it.

/pd – It's like Matt says:

<< One of the things I love about Google Reader is that they listen to feedback. But sometimes you gotta leave feedback behind and just work on fun stuff. >>

From: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/new-reader-trends-page/

But you're right – this isn't *that* impressive – it's just interesting. I'd also like to be able to search my subscriptions from within Google Reader. Right now, whenever I've read something but can't remember where, I have to try to remember in which feed I read it, then go to Google Blog Search and hope for the best...

I love this, wish I had similar stats for my gmail reading. I'd love to see the history over time of the volumes and times of day that I send, receive, and read email.

About search. Don't worry, the Reader Team has been beat down about the issue numerous times in their Google Group:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Reader/browse_frm/thread/46ecef4ffd2722da/b39f01bd4b94bb94?lnk=gst&q=search&rnum=1#b39f01bd4b94bb94

There's more than just the above thread but that's the one that was started by Mihai and pinned to the top of the group for a few months.

Ton Ruscoe:

<<Right now, whenever I've read something but can't remember where, I have to try to remember in which feed I read it, then go to Google Blog Search and hope for the best...>>

Shouldn't Google Desktop be able to help you with that? I can't tell you how many times I've said to myself, "I remember reading that somewhere a few months ago...dammit...I can't remember where I saw that." Well, I used to say that. Since Google Desktop came out, all I have to do is remember a few keywords from said page, type them into GDS, and voila.

Richard Eid said:

<< Since Google Desktop came out, all I have to do is remember a few keywords from said page, type them into GDS, and voila. >>

Does that work if you only read the feed in Google Reader and not actually visit the site?

Well, I had assumed it would since it's text that actually comes up within a page, but it doesn't. After investigating a few instances, I found that it does NOT index Google Reader. I'm thinking that it would handle GR in the same fashion as GMail. Maybe a future addition to GD? I wouldn't mind...now that I'm dragging from the bumper of the bandwagon.:)

Tony, yeah I hear you on the fun stuff. coding ... but as you know, I am a feeder of ideas and track suggestions and turn arounds times too!!

RSS and search is important.. it needs to be integrated with CES. its been my cry for a long time..

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/review-custom-search-engine/#comment-88522

"if the right hand not knowth what the left hand is doing, then of what worth is the deed ?" -anon :)-