Google Reader Trends

From You're Using RSS Now...Right? by Chris Butler

While I think that sharing is Reader's killer feature, the trends view ( ) is my favorite feature. The trends view is like a mini-analytics application just for your account and provides an overview of how you use Reader, including how many subscriptions you have, how many items you've read, shared, starred or emailed, how often your subscriptions update, when you tend to use Reader, and which of your tags have the most activity. The importance of this tool brings me back to the overall strategy that you need to have in order to just keep up with the momentum of RSS, which is to be constantly evaluating the information that comes to you. While I've spent most of this newsletter discussing how to do this on an article to article basis by skimming to evaluate whether to read it or move on, it's also important to do on a larger scale by measuring the overall value of a subscription.

Over time, it's likely that you'll find reasons to unsubscribe to an RSS feed. Perhaps you'll find another subscription covering the same kind of information as an existing one, but with a level of activity that suits you better. Or, you may even lose interest in a subscription. Some subscriptions may only run for a specific time period. Using trends, you can see exactly how often a particular subscription delivers new articles to you, and how often you actually read rather than skimmed them (especially if you star those articles which you've actually read). I've unsubscribed to several RSS feeds after looking at trends from these different perspectives, which keeps my total number at a manageable level.

You'll likely find many other ways to use the information from trends to evaluate your use of Reader and make small adjustments that suit your lifestyle and subscriptions best, including measuring the appropriateness of tags based upon your subscriptions' content and activity and even planning a time in your day to use Reader based upon when you tend to read you subscriptions. Overall, I think that the value of the trends will correspond to how much you experiment with RSS initially and continue to evaluate your subscriptions over time.

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Chris | August 29, 2008 2:14 PM

Update (hat tip to Eric): Copyblogger has a good article titled "How to Read," which discusses the 4 levels of reading from Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book (in my library). Good stuff.

I love the conclusion:

"Reading, at its fundamental essence, is not about absorbing information. It’s about asking questions, looking for answers, understanding the various answers, and deciding for yourself. Think of reading this way, and you quickly realize how this allows you to deliver unique value to your readers as a publisher.

If you think all of this sounds like a lot of work, well… you’re right. And most people won’t do it, just like most people will never blog or publish online in the first place.

That’s why your readers need you. They need you to do the work for them, because they don’t want to become an expert. So, it’s your job to understand the complex and grasp the essentials, then make it simple, easy to read, and entertaining."

Steve | April 16, 2009 8:30 AM

Thanks for that primer. It still seems like it can absorb a lot of time to set up the subscriptions in the first place but at least you give a practical way to organise and sift through the overwhelming amount of information.