RSS Reader Feeds: What Do I Actually Read?

Google Reader Trends gives you a good amount of information what you are reading, but what does “read” mean? Pressing the “mark all as read” button? Well, start with dividing your “shared items” by “read items” to determine blog relevance.

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- Date: Monday, February 16, 2009 Time: 1:36 pm Discussion: View Comments Category: Entertainment and Gaming Tags: statistics Print this blog post!

As you might have noticed at the bottom of the page I am using Google Reader for skimming my RSS feeds and sharing interesting items. I decleared RSS feed bankruptcy a couple of times now, clicking the “mark all as read” button and just don’t worrying about all the news I missed.

The “trends” page of Google Reader gives a good overview of my reading habits.

Google Reader Trends

You notice the “you read 2,251 items”, which would make about 75 news per day *every* day. Of course that’s absurd, and reading 600 items on 2/11 as the graph suggests is also absurd. So what does “read” actually mean? Not much at all. I might have glanced at it, read every word, scrolled over it, or pressed the “mark all as read” button.

The next two statistics give a bit more information:

Google Reader shared items (top 10)

Google Reader 'read' items (top 10)

Now I wish Google Reader Trends would do the job for me and calculate the ratio of shared vs. read items. Of course some of the RSS feeds I’m not subscribed yet for the full 30 days (such as the delicious bookmarks), but the following graph gives you a good overview:

Google Reader Shared vs. Read Items (in %)

I wonder if there are other Google Reader statistic programs out there to analyze what I read… of course I could use a Firefox plugin such as Blogrollr, but I’d rather decide myself which posts are important work-wise and which posts I’d rather keep private – or are simply not relevant. Anyone?

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Q&A;: How to Save RSS Searches in Google Reader? (ariwriter.com)

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My New Blogging Strategy (gavinknight.com)

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Feedly – RSS with Style (enterpriseirregulars.com)

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