I just noticed that Google Reader has a "trends" link. I don't recall seeing that before; though I admit that I don't often look at the interface for Google Reader, as I'm too focused on the news content it is displaying to me.
From your 83 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,730 items
I haven't starred, shared, or emailed any items. I'm not much for social networking functionality, which explains why I haven't shared or emailed anything.
What's really interesting in the trends is both my personal reading habits, and the posting habits of the sites I read. I read more items between 7 and 9 AM than at any other time through the day. This makes sense, since all the news that has accumulated overnight is waiting for me. And for some reason, I read more items on Wednesdays than any other day of the week.
BoingBoing and Slashdot both post about 20 items per day. The feed for my Flickr contacts is running around 15 items per day, while the Flickr feed for the tag "skippy" is about five items per day.
Ultimately, all of these stats are completely meaningless, and not particularly useful to me. I don't really care how often sites publish, or what percentage of their posts I read, or when I read news the most. I care about reading the news, not reading metadata plotting trends about me reading the news. That said, I'm now interested in subscribing to a variety of feeds to which I wouldn't normally subscribe, just to see what sort of trends might develop.
The link has been there for a least a couple of months. There's been Trends for a long time, just a few months ago, they added the link to the main navigation (before you accessed it through Settings).
I'm kinda uncomfortable about these business corps gathering our personal habits. So I try to avoid website personalizations/social networking where practical. But I know that such personalizations are inevitable in the future and I might be losing out by staying away...What do you think?
I agree, Prashanth, that it can be a little unsettling just how much information many of these sites can collect about us. I don't do social networking sites mostly because I'm not interested in the services they provide -- I don't want to be linked in; I don't care about all the FaceBook users from my high school; etc etc.
I recognize the value proposition of many social networking sites, but they don't satisfy my social needs. My social networking application is email: I communicate with the bulk of my friends by email. I only occasionally use my instant messaging program; though I do interact through IRC quite a lot.
As for data collection, if a site can use the information it gathers to provide me a better service, I'm cautiously accepting of that. I don't know how Google would directly provide me a better feed reader based on the statistics they've collected; but I'm sure they'll come up with something!