Google Reader Adds Trends
Google has recently enabled a new section to its RSS Reader software which allows you to track your reading habits.
From Lifehacker:
The Trends page is useful for a lot of things, especially if you like to keep track of where you do the majority of your reading… Reader’s Trends can help you decide which feeds have a high signal-to-noise ratio based on how much of the feeds content you actually read.
It seems like this could be a useful tool for pruning subscriptions and highlighting trends in your reading (luckily, those of us using FeedDemon already have a similar feature, highlighting this “attention data” available to us).
Of course, to Google, aggregating this data across thousands of users is immensely useful. It makes you wonder whether Google Reader is just a way for Google to measure RSS traffic, rather than SERP or Analytics traffic. Whether or not it would be another factor they could include in their ranking algorithm is debateable, but this information would definitely be useful for advertisers and publishers.
Some have also wondered whether this information could be used as a Digg-killer?
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Google, Web Statistics, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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