Google Reader has added some new data to the Trends department. For those who do not use Google Reader, or pay little attention to the Trends feature, it simply lays your reading habits out graphically so you can see when you are reading feeds the most, what you are reading the most, what you are reading the least, and so on.
It’s a useful tool for users who are subscribed to a lot of different feeds. It helps you eliminate ones that you may have subscribed to, but never ended up paying much attention to, hence decreasing the clutter in your reader.
They are now giving us a deeper look into not only our own reading habits, but publisher habits as well. A post on the Official Google Reader Blog explains:
We also wanted to expose more fine-grained data. While it’s useful to know what your overall reading trends are, we thought it might be interesting to also display this data on a subscription by subscription level. If you’ve ever been curious about when your favorite subscriptions were publishing new posts or when you were reading them, click the “show details” link in the upper right corner of the viewer. It’s a good way to peak into your personal habits as well as the posting schedule of your favorite blogs. While you’re in there, check out the other details – we also display the last crawl time and any errors encountered during that crawl.
Darnell Clayton at the Blog Herald makes a good point, “What’s interesting about this new feature is that it allows bloggers to see how frequently some of the top (or bottom) blogs post throughout the day/week/month, which may help those striving to break into the coveted “A-list” understand the habits of some of the blogs they frequently read.”
For those who just use it for everyday reading purposes, it’s just another way to help keep your reader organized, which we all know grows increasingly difficult the more feeds we subscribe to. It’s like Dolapo at the Google Reader Blog said. Some of us are obsessed with keeping our “items read” as low as possible.
