More Google Reader Stats When ‘show details’

I just noticed that when you click on “show details” in Google Reader, you get a graph of how frequently posts come from that feed and how often you read those posts. It used to only show subscriber count (via Google Reader) and when the feed was last updated. It’s one of those things where it’s like “so… what” and it won’t influence any of the decisions I make in life in any way, but hopefully when all of you “show details” for FlowingData all the red and blue bars are aligned :).

P.S. Greetings from Chicago. It is much too early in the morning.

12 Comments

  • What’s more interesting about this (to me) is that this and now the usual Trends section now show posting trends, not just reading trends. I’m pretty obsessive about reading my feeds as they come in, so the previous Trends wasn’t really all that useful for me. It pretended to show me my reading trends, but it really showed me the posting trends of my feeds, since my reading trend is to keep on top of it pretty aggressively, all week long.

    Of course, the new graph isn’t much more useful, since nearly all of my blue and red bars are equal for every blog on every day. The Time of Day view is neat, though, because it gives me a good measure of how long it takes me to read a post after it arrives. I can see the gaps when I’m sleeping and on my way to/from work. Other than that, it’s just confirmation that I pay way too much attention to reading my feeds.

  • Neat! I hadn’t realized that they’d updated the feed details like that. My graph for FD has taller blue bars in the middle of the week and then a massively tall red bar on Fridays when I catch up with all the good stuff I missed. :)

  • If you read the entire post in Google Reader, without clicking on it to read it in the blog itself, Google shows it as not having been read. I read all FlowingData posts in their entirety, but only half or fewer have a red bar. I suspect the posts I click on (represented by the red bars) are the posts I feel the need to comment on.

  • @Jon: That’s curious. I read everything in Google Reader and rarely click on the link to the original URL. All my red bars show up fine for me. You might check to see if you have red bars that are taller than the associated blue bars later on during the day or on later days. That would indicate that you don’t read the articles immediately, but that you do come back around to them later. Other than that, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have bars that represent your true reading habits, even if you only read in Reader itself.

  • To tell you the truth, I never noticed “Show Details”, because I group my posts into categories, and almost never read a single blog by itself. The red and blue bars were not all the same size, but the tall red ones were not tall enough to account for the blue bars.

    New theory: If you check the box under the entry in Google Reader, it is counted as a “read” article, but if you click the “Mark All As Read” button at the top, it is ignored. (I don’t let it mark articles as read if I scroll past them, only if I actually check the box or click the button.)

  • @Marty – Same for me. Can never have too much of a good thing

    @Patti – As long as it’s not all blue :)

    @Jon – yeah, that’s right i think – at least that’s true for just the regular trends.

  • Interesting “discovery” :)

    i feel that some “data” shown hence, mayn’t “exact” >> e.g.- the no. of subscribers…. it shows quite less than half (and for some the figure is less than even 10%)of exact value for most of the reputed blogs!
    Do half of these readers use a different feed reader? God knows!!

  • would be nice if google shared the reading stats of a blog with it;s authors, even nicer if it was in google analytics. it would be easy to make it anonymous and to opt out if you really cared.