Google Reader (GR), a web-based RSS reader, which I use to read my subscription feeds from various sources, has added the ability to view your reading trends. As you browse through your feeds and view pages, Google Reader tracks your usage and counts the readership rates.

Explore Google Reader by signing up for a Google account, if you haven’t already done so. Then, go to GR and click on the “Trends” link in the middle of the page. The GR team hasn’t yet added a link on the left sidebar to the “Trends” page, so click on the “Home” link if you can’t find it.

The page is organized into five sections: a summary, graphs, reading trends, subscription trends, and a tags cloud.

Google Reader Trends page

At the top left side, you will find a summary of what you have been reading in your subscriptions. A rough indication of how scholarly you are. :)

Summary of my usage. Yes, quite a bit of reading.

The next three screenshots show my usage patterns over 30 days, a week, and hours of a day. Like most white-collar lemmings, I’m not particularly active online during the weekends, especially over the recent year-end holidays (5 days!).

On a typical 24-hour period, I tend to read mostly during mid-afternoon and quite a bit around midnight.

Last 30 days graph

Day of the week graph

Time of day graph

I don’t actually read all posts, especially Bloggingstocks.com and Digg. More than half of them I skim over the title and just that bit of information is digested.

The reading and subscription trends show how complete I go through each subscription. Most of them are 100%, because my style of reading is to decide on-the-stop whether the post is worth reading or I should mark it as read immediately. Therefore, what I have left unmarked are all unread.

Go try out GR Trends and see how well fed you are on the web. Or is it watch what and how you eat?

Links:

Google Reader
<URL:http://www.google.com/reader>

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