Google Reader Adds Trend Analysis

Google Reader Adds Trend Analysis

Google's browser-based RSS reader now includes a Reader Trends page.

Google Reader can now help you analyze your feed reading habits.
Taking a page from Google Trends, Google software engineer Mihai Parparita said on Wednesday in a blog post that Google's browser-based RSS reader now includes a Reader Trends page.

Google Reader's new Trend page shows the user his or her subscriptions, starred items, read items, and shared items. It tracks the number of items posted by a given RSS source and the percentage of them the user has read. It details tags added by the user to categorize posts and it presents bar graphs of user-reading habits.

For Google Reader users, particularly those with hundreds of RSS subscriptions, trend analysis may offer some useful insight into where one's attention is being spent.

"If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun," Parparita says in his post. "You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know."

And after you measure how keeping up on the blogosphere impacts your productivity, perhaps you'll want to share that information with your supervisor. Or not.