Solo Technology

Google Reader gained a “Reader Trends” page this week, full of fun and useful statistics.

Here’s what’s at the top of my Trends page:

From your 81 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,876 items, starred 20 items, and shared 15 items.

Holy Crap! I’ve read 1876 items in the last month. Zoinks.

Next to that is a graph with 3 views (the tabs along the top) for Last 30 days, Time of Day and Day of Week (shown below):

The Bottom half of the page has “Reading Trends” and “Subscription Trends.” What’s neat about both is that in the far right column there’s a little trashcan icon. You can quickly and easily drop a feed from these reports.

I’m not totally sure about that “% Read” column. Lot of mine show 95% when, to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t missed any. Not a show-stopping issue though.

The trashcan is most useful in the Subscription Trends “inactive” tab. A quick way to spot dead or very inactive feeds.

If you are pondering a web based Feed Reader, you really ought to give Google Reader a shot.

One thing it doesn’t have (or I haven’t found): An easy way to show my subscribed feeds. Sure, I can export my opml and offer a link to it, but there doesn’t seem to be any real-time provision. I really would like to have a link that when clicked would simply show all my current subscribed feeds.

This must be my day to write about Google Reader. You might enjoy the article from this morning about Google Reader Sharing as well.

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