Google Reader Trends

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.