I was tweeting/yammering with @petahopkins the other day about Bloglines and my early days of blogging and blog reading. My first serious blog post with Bloglines was on 6 October 2004 but I became an avid reader of other blogs a few months before that using the RSS feed aggregation facilities in Bloglines. These memories have been stirred because Bloglines will close on 1 November 2010.
During the September semester of 2005 I introduced blogging as an optional, additional assessment for Masters students. At this same time, in fact exactly 5 years ago today, I began to try Google Reader and I have been hooked ever since. I was reminded this morning when I brought up Trends link to find:
Since October 8, 2005 you have read a total of 79,983 items.
To my surprise that works out at 1333 blog posts a month or about 44 posts a day for 5 years straight! I should have learned something in that time. Of course many posts received only a few seconds of my attention before I hit the trusty ‘j’ key in Google Reader to show the next post in the chronologically ordered stream of posts from a number of feeds. In fact I must be gradually reading less as the figures for the last 30 days are:
From your 96 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,174 items, clicked 110 items, starred 2 items, shared 15 items, and emailed 0 items.
The shared items number is interesting as it is a measure of quality and amounts to about 1.5% of all posts. Shared items are flagged to other readers who choose to follow me on Google Reader and more importantly on Google Buzz. In turn I see the shared items of those I choose to follow – a useful way to form a community of like minds.
Another telling output of the Trends analysis is my tag cloud of the posts I read:
This fairly accurately mirrors the topics that interest me.
Will I still be using Google Reader in 5 more years?
