Google Reader Tracks Personal Attention Metadata

Googlified says the Google RSS Reader has added a feature that shows just where your attention goes. Reading trends displays the items you read, starred, shared in the past 30 days. Subscription trends identifies the blogs that update the most and which blogs are inactive. More on the Google Reader blog.

Neat idea. It's a bit scary to see just how much time I spend with RSS feeds. I would love to see them open this up on an opt-in basis so we can see aggregate data from all users. Google can take this and turn it into a Share Your OPML on steroids without any intervention from the user.

Now imagine if they were turn this information around and sell it to marketers. Thankfully, I bet their privacy policy prohibits it. Still, it's an interesting idea if Google can pull it off in an ethical way and on a completely opt-in basis. Tie this with Adsense for Feeds and you have an interesting platform.

Technorati Tags: Google, metadata, attention

Comments

[Allen Stern]

Jets? I think I will need to hit remove from my RSS feed for MP.

Giants = only football team in town!

GO GMEN :)

[Marianne Richmond]

From a marketers standpoint, I think the accumulation of attention data would go a long way towards the elusive engagement metric...and be a win-win if it were an opt in.

[Chris Sad]

It's nice that Google is paying attention to attention - at least on the surface.

Manual Trackback:
http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2007/01/congratulations-to-google-attention.html

[usrbingeek]

Reader takes another step closer to the Digg Killer.

[Louis Gray]

I'm impressed with how Google continues to upgrade Google Reader. It's propelled me to ditch NetNewsWire and NewsGator, and the system works great across platforms, browsers, etc., just like a Web OS should.

All told, my stats showed a mere 8,000+ posts read over the last 30 days, with 325 or so making the link blog.

http://www.louisgray.com/live/files/google_reader_trends.html

[Dario]

In this post i talk about Link Blog and this new feature:

http://www.dariosalvelli.com/2007/01/google-reader-link-blog

I hope that the Reader Team will improve more frequently the feed reader.

[stijn v.]

I find the list of inactive feeds a great way to clean your feeds for the new year. Already subscribed to at least 10 feeds that aren't updating anymore.

The thing I miss, though, is a way to re-sort the list of reading trends. (That may already work in another browser, but I use Opera.) Sorting according to % read would shed a new light on where I spend most of my time.

And to quote my trends, just for reference: "From your 115 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2.763 items, starred 20 items, and shared 1 items."

[rajAT]

The data shown by google reading trends is not correct. For me it shows that I have give my maximum attention to Textually.org for the simple I read maximum posts on it. But the posts on textually are read by me in a jiffy. Say it will take 2-3 mins to read 50 posts on textually. But It will take alot more time to read posts on feld thoughts, avc or freakonomics. So a single post on freakonomics can take 10-15 mins. So who has grabbed more of my attention.

I guess its not difficult to see that. But the google attention reader doesnt see that yet.

Cheers,
rajAT

[Dean Fragnito]

I agree, the data is wrong. I subscribe to cnn, not sure why. I hardly read the feeds but usualy just glance at the headlines as I scroll down. Looking at the trends data it apears that I give my attention to the feeds that generate the most postings. Same is true with frequently updated. Seems like this trends data just shows you what feeds generate the most posts, not what feeds captured the most attention. I would expect more from Google. I have been hearing that a lot lately. Maybe we expect too much from them.

[jedweb]

Maybe I'm missing something but shouldn't the percent read be 100% for all feeds? The only way to get an item off of your list of feed items is to mark it read, even if you haven't actually 'read' it; e.g. 'mark all as read'

Am I using Google Reader incorrectly?

[stijn v.]

@ rajAT: Good point. Perhaps it would better better if Google Reader kept track of the seconds/minutes your selector stays focussed on a particullar item. Don't know if that's privacy-friendly though, and I can already guess some possible mistakes if someone ever tries to implement an idea like that.

[Tom Biro]

Yeah, I definitely like this a lot. I'm not a user of the service, but can appreciate this. FeedDemon has these statistics, and they are really helpful in getting you to realize what you a) read the most and b) read the least, or not at all, feed-wise.

Definitely falls into the "getting things done" category as far as keeping your RSS in order.

[Anne Currie]

Does it let you search what you have seen on blogs?

I use a tool to do something similar for me already called Qlockwork (http://www.workingprogram.com). Full disclosure: I'm a developer on Qlockwork.

Apart from the obvious "what did I do, when did I do it" question, one of the most useful features of any tool like this is the ability to search your own blog reading history. Let's say you remember that you saw a good blog post on "amusing kitten photos" a few months back but weren't interested in it then, so you didn't bookmark it. Now you want to go back and look at it again, so you bring up your Qlockwork/Google activity history and search it for the link.

Qlockwork only records the window titles and URLs, but they are usually fairly good for returning decent search results.