Google Reader Adds RSS Trends
The Google Reader team has just implemented a Reader "trends" page that tracks, as Steve Rubel says, personal attention metadata. Googler Matt Cutts shared his stats, as did Scoble. Seeing all those stats is cool, and I'm all for reading a lotta feeds. But I've never been a fan of RSS one-upmanship, and I hope this doesn't start a whole "I read more and faster than you" arms race. Having personal attention data is really cool, but something in me bristles at the thought of everybody sharing what and how much and how quickly they read. The faux self-effacing exclamations--"well, golly, Beav, I read so much today"--are a little transparent. Am I wrong? |
Wow, this is cool, and it's going to finally get me to change over to Google Reader for good.
Comments (1)
I use a tool to do something similar for me already called Qlockwork (http://www.workingprogram.com). Full disclosure: I'm a developer on Qlockwork so I'm a bit biased.
Apart from the obvious "what did I do, when did I do it" question, I've found one of the most useful features of a tool like this is the ability to search your own browsing history. Let's say you remember you saw a good blog post on the Google RSS Reader few months back but weren't interested in it then, so you didn't bookmark it. Now you want to go back and look at it again, so you bring up your Qlockwork/Google activity history and search for the link.
I suspect this angle may be what interests Google about the idea in the long term.
Again, I'm biased but I think Qlockwork has one up on Google here, because it captures everything you do on your PC, not just browsing. So, you have greater data and context for your search.
Posted by Anne Currie | January 6, 2007 4:52 AM