Trim Your Google Reader Fat with Trends
If you’re using Google Reader to manage your RSS feeds, a handy feature is Google Trends. This keeps track of your feed activity on a day to day basis.
Trends keeps track of your most read feeds as well as what days and what times you read them. This becomes handy if you want to keep track of how your feeds are working for you.
Probably the most useful feature so far is Subscription Trends, which keeps track of the most frequently updated feeds and those that are inactive.
Check the Inactive tab to see what feeds you may have subscribed to in the past that are no longer being updated. From here you can unsubscribe from each feed by hitting the Trash icon.
Simple and quick feed management.
Reader - [Google]
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Comments
David says on April 6th, 2007 at 9:12 am
I’ve worked rather hard to find the most productive ways to use Reader myself, and Trends has become an important part of that. Here’s what I do:
I sort my “All Items” “Newest first” and only click the items that interest me. I can always see where I left off by scrolling down until I spot “grayed” out previously read items. By doing this, the data I get from Trends is even more accurate: it shows me which feeds I don’t tend to read on a regular basis. If I mark all as read, those feeds of lesser importance to me are never shown as mostly unread! This has been very useful.
Some improvement to trends I’m hoping for include several more sorting options, like being able to view stats by either amount or percentage (currently lists are sorted only by amount), sorting descending or ascending (currently lists only sort descending, so you can never see the bottom lists… in other words, those lists you hardly ever read…). Just thought I’d offer my method. I’d love to see what others do for efficient use of Google Reader!
Geoff says on April 7th, 2007 at 8:56 am
As a student, trimming my feeds is very important, as I usually don’t have a ton of time to blow. I usually follow the philosophy “Subscribe hard, Unsubscribe harder”. Trends is important for analyzing my reading patterns, so I can cut down on stuff I don’t read.
I am surprised that you have only read 915 items, with 500+ subscriptions. I have 100 subscriptions and read 10,000 items per month. I also make a point to share whatever interests me. I am kind of into Social Feedreading.
Subscribe to my shared items:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/geoffs-shared