Google Reader offers Trends analysis page

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Google Reader offers Trends analysis page

by Jason Clarke Jan 4th 2007

If you've made the switch to Google Reader, you might be interested to learn that Google has released a page in your account called Trends that will give you some interesting statistics about the pages you read, including the total number of feeds you are currently subscribed to, the number of posts you've read in the past 30 days, the number of posts you've starred or shared, the time of day and day of week that you read posts, and some interesting analysis of your reading trends and subscription trends.

For me, this page is a godsend. It gives me the ability to see which of my subscriptions are dormant, allowing me to feel free to unsubscribe from them - it even offers a handy unsubscribe button next to each subscription listed. The opposite is also true; I can see which feeds update most often, and decide whether I get enough value from reading those feeds to staying subscribed to them.

More details about Google Reader Trends can be found at the official Google Reader Blog. Unfortunately, I've yet to be able to deduce what the % Read statistic means; my initial thought was that it describes how many of the posts in a given feed I've actually read, but that doesn't make sense when I go back and look at my actual feeds. Maybe someone can comment here with the actual meaning of that column.

Tags: Atom, Feed Reading, feed statistics, FeedReading, FeedStatistics, Google Reader, Google Reader Trends, GoogleReader, GoogleReaderTrends, RSS

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jody said 9:58AM on 1-05-2007

I believe that the #Read/%Read mark the # that were actually clicked on, as opposed to ones that were simply "marked as read".

Ranajay Sen said 4:43PM on 1-05-2007

I believe that the rate is the total number of entries in a feed you read divided by the total number of entries available. However, I think that Google Reader interprets the usage of "Mark all as read." as you ignoring the entries instead of actually reading them, and this may have created the disparity you were talking about. I'm proud to say, however, that Download Squad is the only feed in my Google Reader account with a complete 100% read rate.

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