New Reader Trends page

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. Mihai Parparita recently posted about the new Google Reader Trends page.

Here’s what mine looks like:

Google Reader Trends Page

That’s right, I’ve read 2000+ blog posts from 80+ feeds in the last 30 days. Booyah! πŸ™‚ I clicked on the “Time of day” tab in the top right corner so you can see that I do most of my feed reading in the morning.

The bottom left corner shows that I read pretty much every item in my feeds, and it also gives you an idea of which blogs post the most often. The bottom right corner can be used to see how many posts a day each feed does. But it also has what I call the “hall of shame” for feeds that haven’t been updated recently. Hmm, I see a few blackhats haven’t updated their blogs in a while. πŸ™‚

This is a pretty addictive page; my first reaction is that I want to know how much time I’ve spent reading items in Google Reader. But on second thought, not only would that be hard to compute, but maybe I don’t really want to know. πŸ™‚

Anybody want to share snapshots of their trends page? I’m curious how many feeds other folks like Barry or Ionut or Nathan or Loren or Robert Scoble or Haochi read.

79 Responses to New Reader Trends page (Leave a comment)

  1. Wow. Haochi dosn’t show specific feeds, but he’s kicking my butt:
    http://googlified.com/2007google-reader-now-shows-stats/
    shows 146 subscriptions and 4,921 items read. Daaaaaamn. πŸ™‚

  2. “From your 167 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 10,113 items, starred 19 items, and shared 140 items.”

    My reading peaks between 1 and 2 PM, while I’m digesting my lunch.

    http://imjasonh.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-love-google-reader.html

  3. What I love is the tag cloud at the bottom. I haven’t tagged any the post that I’ve read. After seeing how cool the cloud bubble was I went nuts tagging all my incoming post. Very addicting and very cool.

    I have to ask the question, when do we see a Google “digg” site based off tags,stars and shares. I know I’m not the first to bring this up, but with what’s in place now with the trends view it’s very clear that Google has all the information to make a really nice and focused “digg” like system.

  4. 303 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 13,389 items, starred 120 items, and shared 633 items.

    That read amount isn’t accurate because I just went through and subscribed to ~175 more feeds.

    Sad part is only one person is reading my shared items–as far as I know.
    Next week should be interesting to see how well Reader handles all the CES and Macworld news-explosion!

  5. I’m a huge stats whore. Thanks Google Reader team!

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

  6. Search Engine Land appears to really be taking off, if the trends used in the example represents similar reading habits among SEOs.

    If this is true, it may be one of the fastest rising blogs in recent history.

    However, as with most of the blogs listed, some editors cross published their topics in another blog – or the same news is sometimes repeated through out several blogs.

    This thread is going to be read by tens of thousands….
    Pity the number 21 blog who did not make the sceenshot in the Top 20
    πŸ™ ,

    . πŸ˜€ Oh, it must have been….

  7. I’m spending a lot of time reading blogs, hehe.. Great tool. I love stats and why not in the reader.

    How about a top 10 of users.. The one with the most subscriptions, the one that reads the most, etc.

  8. Just thought I would ask, any chance that you might use one of Readers other features, “Put a clip on your site” for stories that you’ve starred (or particularly like). (It’s in your tag settings page listed to the right of any tags that are public)

  9. ImJasonH and Stephen C, holy crap! That’s a lot o’ feeds. I bow before your feed voracity πŸ™‚

    NateDawg, if I could get a bookmarklet that would let me surf around and star/share things directly from the web, I would totally use that to make it into some sort of linkblog. Ideally, it would let me add an optional comment as well. Something like what Jeremy Zawodny has on his blog, for example.

  10. Oh, it must have been….

    SEO Buzzbox, by Aaron Pratt.

    Had to be. Aaron’s got mad bloggin’ skillz to pay da billz, and he’ll jack yo’ shizz if you get up in his grill, homeboy!

  11. Testing something…please disregard this post.

  12. Testing something else… Matt Cutts’ blog…please also disregard.

  13. Okay, that was weird…I just did two posts (not the two above it) in a row that not only didn’t show up, it was like I never submitted them.

    Do posts get automatically filtered based on certain words now?

  14. http://slicer.neosys.com.br/media/feed-trends.JPG

    I read (much) less feeds, but I have far more regular writers that I subscribe for than you, as it seems. Despite many Google releated stuff, I guess it comes down to diversification: a GTD site, a (Brazilian) link blog for random things, Scoble, LotR fan site and forum, and a world-class writer are in my top 10. Arguably being the best on their class they generate way more content, even if it isn’t always original.

    SearcH EngineS WeB got it right about double content, and I suffer even more because of the Brazilian feeds when they have permission to translate, but still it’s not much overall. SEL vs. SEW was a tough one to bear with in the first weeks (i.e. looked like Barry Schwartz posting twice), but now SEW seems to have caught its groove and the original content looks good.

    By the way, you’re the lucky 13 here. πŸ˜‰

  15. I’ve been meaning to post on Google Reader, and I’ll do this at some point. I’ve been using it for a while and it’s won me over from my old reader, Newsgator. I like the way you can speed through the feeds. I wish that the shared items were collected in some more usable/shareable fashion than just chrono pages with a few posts per page — public viewing of shared items by tag would be a cool feature.

    According to Trends I have 115 subscriptions and over the last 30 days I’ve read 6,940 items, starred 9 items, and shared 170 items.

  16. Matt,
    > if I could get a bookmarklet that would let me surf around and star/share things directly from the web

    Try StumbleUpon (something I wish Google would buy, hint hint). It may be what you’re looking for.

  17. I like your interest for blackhat newsletters πŸ˜‰

  18. Does anyone have more than 0 starred posts? I’m sure i starred some posts last month but it shows 0. But anyway it’s a great feature, i hope Blogger will soon give us stats about our feeds too πŸ™‚

  19. Stephen: what’s your link blog URL?

    Matt: my stats are:
    483 subscriptions
    26,026 items read
    1,721 items shared.

    I LOVE Google Reader! I can’t believe I hit the “J” key 26,026 times in the past month. Amazing!

  20. I am using WizzRSS Reader for Firefox so I can’t see this kind of stats :((
    Maybe it’s time to migrate back to Google Reader…

  21. Robert,

    Personally I’m more of a space bar guy, not a j-key guy πŸ˜‰

    Now if I could just keep a real blog going I’d be set.

  22. I just got another idea, since Google Reader gives you no sense of how many readers you actually have I “burnt” it in Feed Burner:
    http://feeds.feedburner.com/stephenlinks

    Note to Matt: if you can please remove that link I previously posted, thanks!

  23. Update to previous post, feedburner doesn’t work too well… hmmm, the posts aren’t showing correctly in Google Reader. Maybe that wasn’t such a revolutionary idea.

  24. Also, I wouldn’t mind seeing some nice stats for Google Videos I’ve upload. Right now the video page itself has more stats than the Stats section of https://upload.video.google.com/

    Of course, in order to view my stats in a graph form, I have to go to the video page, which counts as a hit. It is Heisenbergian stats checking!

    Andrew

  25. Mhm here are my stats:

    From your 243 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,940 items

  26. if I could get a bookmarklet that would let me surf around and star/share things directly from the web, I would totally use that

    Just wondering, either Flock or Firefox+extensions can probably do that. Or if not, I’m sure you could easily write your own extension instead πŸ™‚

  27. Oh sod, it keeps pre-populating in that winehq link I posted just the once. Time to clear out me cache πŸ™

  28. How is ‘read’ measured? It would be more useful if it measured only items that had a clickthru.

  29. Hmm I have to admit this is a pretty cool feature. I should really start using some kind of reader software rather than flicking through sites several times a day. The more stats the better because once you have run out of things to read you can waste more time reading stats lol.

  30. Are you sure they listen to feedback Matt?

    We’ve been hosting a feed for two years, it is updated daily, and none of the major feed readers have any problems picking up our headlines.
    Apple Safari, Sage, Y! and MSN all display them instantly.

    Yet Google Reader hasn’t updated our feed headlines since Dec. 22nd. 2006.
    And before that it used to post-date the headlines by two months, so they didn’t appear at the top of the reader interace.

    Talk about, out of whack!

    I emailed G twice with the details, and even tried changing the feed protocol to accommodate G, but to no avail.

    I know it is still in beta, but it is embarrassingly bad.

    We are even considering removing the G Reader button from our Feed reading subscriptions page.

    Is it worth emailing them again?

  31. From your 96 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,379 items, starred 0 items, and shared 0 items.

  32. Also, it’s rather disappointing that blackhats are slacking on the blog updates. Not to worry though, my blog will be returning sometime in the near future as soon as I wrap up a few projects.

  33. The screen shot used in my post wasn’t mine, it was TomHTML’s, I can’t see the Trends page one min before I publish the post.
    Here’s mine: http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/4029/googlereader7ul8.png
    Google Official Blogs included all Google Blogs, English and other languages. πŸ™‚

  34. I haven’t tried Google Reader yet, although I use a bunch of the other services (Analytics, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc). For blog reading without using the web browser, check out BlogBridge (http://www.blogbridge.com). Its a nice little utility.

  35. Some interesting blogs in those new subscriptions!

  36. I’m glad everyone is liking trends, and especially that everyone is posting their stats and charts on their blogs.

    ne1home, can you get in touch with me at mihai.parparita at gmail.com about your feed problem?

    Mihai Parparita
    Google Reader Engineer

  37. You know something, I am pissed. I recommended this exact feature to the Bloglines folks months and months ago. They said they are on it but nothing!

    I don’t use Google Reader, but a feature like this can encourage me to switch.

    This is awesome for a heavy RSS reader.

  38. Mine are located here…sheez, thats alot of trends to view form commenters πŸ™‚

    http://www.bigbrushmedia.com/blog/

  39. What, no Google Watch? πŸ˜‰

    This feature is going to force me to change over to Google Reader. I feel my ability to parse the Web sans Google is rapidly waning. Damn.

  40. Google Reader adds in a trends but lacks the ability to search my feeds.

    πŸ™

    http://knaddison.com/freedbacking/google-reader-search-my-feeds

  41. Just like you did yourself I have switched to feedburner with my blog, and I am also using google reader for my RSS feeds and it works great (besides the fact that it does not have search option!?)

    but, what I have found on google reader while analysing feedburner stats is following remark about feedfetcher (you might be able to send it to proper person):

    Google Feedfetcher

    From the Google description: Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services.
    Google does not currently report the number of subscribers to your feed when it requests the feed, so the number of subscribers you have on Google home or Google Feed reader may be underrepresented by an unknown amount.

  42. I about crapped my pants when I saw SEL with 211 read posts. Especially considering that we at Search Engine Lowdown (SEL) haven’t posted 211 in the last 30 days.

    But alas we are heart-broken as we share the acronym with the glorious Search Engine Land. Luckily, we’re all fans of that as well.

    πŸ™‚

  43. Whoa, does that really scale up so well? (Eg. Roberts 483 feeds.) I currently have 694 feeds in FeedDemon and I _really_ need the whole screen (segmented appropriately) for being able to quickly glance over masses of posts. I can’t afford to use much time on this and so I’ve been a little sceptic about the web readers.

  44. Multi-Worded Adam, I think that I use the default WordPress blacklist of words.

    Robert Scoble, that’s incredible. It’s like you are our personal reviewer of the best 500 feeds on the web. No wonder so many people read your link blog to see what’s going on. πŸ™‚

    I’m starting to realize that a lot of people read more feeds than I do. πŸ™‚

    Esrun, I really can’t imagine trying to visit sites anymore. The only thing for me is that I only want to have 5-6 “high velocity” feeds that post a ton. So I save up sites like Scoble and Valleywag for quiet times. That’s reading more for fun than to see what’s going on.

    ne1home, does Mihai’s post answer your question? Please don’t bug Mihai with search/SEO questions though. πŸ™‚ Mihai, thanks for stopping by.

    Barry, I know you still use Bloglines; that’s part of why I nudged you. πŸ™‚ It isn’t hard to get up-to-date in Bloglines, export the OPML, import it into Reader, and Bob’s your uncle. You can always switch back the same way.

    Haochi, thanks for stopping by and posting yours. I have to admit that I don’t watch every Google blog myself, so I’m glad that some people do. πŸ™‚

    David Dalka, I think I’ve given enough glimpses of my feed reading that someone could almost reconstruct the entire list at this point. πŸ™‚

  45. http://www.mileswilliams.net/files/googlereader.png is mine. Note the awesome use of MSPaint spraycan on the email πŸ™‚

  46. Steve Bryant, good point. I just added you.

    Andrew Hitchcock, I completely forgot my videos! They got 189,923 views in 2006.

    greggles, there’s been a spate of articles about making Custom Search Engines out of your OPML. That’s not a bad way to do it. Inside Google had a good article within the last few days on it.

    mrak, I agree. I’d love for Google Reader to give you subscriber numbers when it fetches a feed. That would really help people out.

    Jeremy Swiller, yup, SEL is Search Engine Land. I renamed my feeds to be short so that it works better reading feeds on Google Reader on my mobile phone. Reading feeds on an LG VX9900 kicks utter ass, by the way. I don’t mind furniture shopping with my wife anymore. πŸ™‚

    Janne Savukoski, I’d give a web reader a try. You can read feeds on any computer (and your phone) and Reader magically tracks what you’ve seen and not seen. And it’s very very fast. I can’t recall ever thinking “I wish this were a native application so that I could read faster.”

    Stephen C, I removed your linkblog link.

  47. Hey there!

    Those statistics are pretty interesting. I’m pretty new to the whole blogging thing, and I noticed both you and Steve Rubel have ways to track when people mention your blog or your name… what would be the best way for me to find out about all these tricks?

    Thank you so much!

    Jeremy

  48. Adding a custom search script to your reader.

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6912

    (not my site, not my link, individual millage may vary)

  49. I use Google Reader on my Treo everyday on the train, but I’m not seeing any data in Trends. I guess it ignores mobile usage… πŸ™

  50. Regarding automatically sharing links on the web, you /can/ do this with a combination of del.icio.us, feedburner, and google reader. I wrote it up here: http://michaeldotnet.blogspot.com/2006/12/sharing-non-feed-items-through-google.html

    I find it works quite nice.

  51. Matt,

    I’ve been wanting to switch from Bloglines to Google Reader. The problem is that I have over 2000 feeds, and when I imported them two issues arose:

    1) It didn’t import all of my feeds
    2) I can’t delete all the feeds to try to start over, and when I try to mark ALL items as read for all the feeds it errors out each time.

    I wrote about this in my blog as well (http://www.nickstarr.com/2007/01/04/google-reader-trends/)

    Anything you can do to help out would be great. My account is nickstarr(at)gmail

  52. Jeremy David, just do a search on (say) Google News for your name:
    http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=%22jeremy+david%22
    Now look on the left-hand side for the “RSS” and “Atom” links. Those are the feeds; just add them directly to your feed reader. You can do similar things with Technorati, Google Blogsearch, etc. It’s pretty handy. πŸ™‚

    Miles, I got a 404 on the image?

  53. On the quietness of the blackhatters, I’m not sure if we should take it as a:

    Postive sign: Matt & team are doing such a good job at stomping out spam that the blackhatters are forced to work much harder.

    Or

    Negative sign: The blackhatters are making so much money, it isn’t worth their time to blog.

  54. January 3, 2007 – Matt Cuts posts his RSS reader stats which shows who’s blogs he reads.

    January 4, 2007 – Shoemoney drops the link bait: http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/01/04/would-you-hire-matt-cutts/.

    Classic!

  55. Matt, until today I read about 20 major feeds regularly, and hit the feed search engines for specific terms daily.

    I did however just upload Lee Odden’s OPML file for his top 250 Search Marketing Blogs, so now I have 270+ blog feeds in my Google Reader πŸ™‚

    Let the trending begin!

  56. @Miguel, wow… I thought I was on David Naylors blog and then realised it was shoemoneys. πŸ˜‰

  57. I got a pretty good laugh out of that one. I was not sure if anyone else noticed it or not.

    (It helps if I spell “Cutts” right, sorry about that Matt ;-))

  58. I have 130 Subscriptions with 1,204 items read. (Almost all SEO Blogs)
    I was a bit surprised that I do that much reading.
    http://hawaii-online-advertising.com/blog/2007/01/04/new-google-reader-trends/

  59. I don’t use Google Reader, but you can get an idea of the number of blogs I read at: http://301url.com/semblogs

  60. Wow….could you say “Big Brother”? Cool technology, but sometimes I feel safer not being logged into my Google ID ; )….

  61. Postive sign: Matt & team are doing such a good job at stomping out spam that the blackhatters are forced to work much harder.

    Or

    Negative sign: The blackhatters are making so much money, it isn’t worth their time to blog.

    It could be neither: they’re just keeping their mouths shut so that they don’t get caught.

    (Yeah, like that’s likely to happen.)

  62. Where is my blog? I thought you read my blog.

  63. “ne1home, does Mihai’s post answer your question?”

    I’ve emailed him the details once more, (and copied it to you too Matt). It’s definitely a bug.

  64. hi matt

    we are using the old iframe stuff for subsciption to out news part πŸ™‚

    we dont have a modern webpage as yours.

  65. Zach, why do you think like that? If it really was Big Brother, why would it be throwing the ‘scary’ stats back at you? πŸ™‚

  66. Matt, the problem isn’t if YOU want to know how much time you’ve spend on reading all those posts. Think of your wife hehe… Mine would go beserk if she knew how much time I spend reading on the net πŸ˜€

  67. What about the accuracy? or it is just the approximative of the readers you are talking about.

  68. It’s not a matter of how we are thinking, it is reality. The more information indexed by the search engines the more that can be found in relations to you. Now they are tracking behavior, very interesting to see and you should definitely keep a close watch on this. How do you see your login tracking features changing in the future?

  69. Marcel, I hadn’t thought about how my wife could tell how much time I spend reading feeds. Hmm. Maybe that’s not such a great feature idea after all, eh?

  70. I am not sure if I will switch just yet. Google Reader still doesn’t run too well, performance wise, on Apple Safari…

    Stats are cool, but speed is more important right now.

  71. Oh man. This thread is from January 3, 2007. Very old one indeed πŸ™‚

    I guess Matt is very busy at the moment at assesing the achievements (or lack of the same) of Google WebSpam Team in 2006 as well as at setting new goals for the team to be achieved during 2007.

    Good luck, Matt and the friends of the team. Keep those spam sites falling πŸ™‚

  72. *Cough*

    No response whatsoever, four days after emailing both Mihai and Matt details of the GReader bug. (For the fourth time! :))

  73. Blackhats in the bottom right hand corner? Who could you possibly mean? No one with “excellent contacts” but is a little immoderate? P^>

    Rgds

    Damon

  74. I am slightly offended that I did not see werty.net in the top 20.

  75. Arhh! I remember a while back when you blogged about Google Reader and I wasn’t really that impressed with it as I use/used Wizz RSS feedreader.

    I say “used” because I really like the idea of Reader Trends, and I’m so easily pleased with the little things, that i’ll switch to Google Reader for my feeds.

    Shame you can’t reset it tho, because it will take a month before I know just how much reading I really do!

    Currently (not a true representation of course because I havn’t been using it)

    From your 135 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 57 items, starred 0 items, and shared 0 items.

  76. Here is my stats. I just changed over to google reader though about 15 days ago.

    http://www.ladylike4.com/uploaded_images/Trends20070111.jpg

  77. thnxxx

  78. thank you for posted of Shame you can’t reset it tho, because it will take a month before I know just how much reading I really do!

    Currently (not a true representation of course because I havn’t been using it)

    From your 135 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 57 items, starred 0 items, and shared 0 items.

  79. Hey there!

    Those statistics are pretty interesting. I’m pretty new to the whole blogging thing, and I noticed both you and Steve Rubel have ways to track when people mention your blog or your name… what would be the best way for me to find out about all these tricks?

    Thank you so much!

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