Blog Tipz

The Trends page of Google Reader, which launched in early 2007, displayed the number of items read, percent read, and items read per day.  Starting today, many new statistical figures come to the ever-popular feed reader.

Main Feed Stats (All Feeds)

First of all, you’ll notice two bars for each hour – one for items posted and items read.  This is intended to help you notice patterns, such as when you are reading and when the bloggers on the other end are updating their blogs with new content.  In addition, you’ll be able to see the main “productivity wasted” periods, or the main times that you are reading your favorite blogs.

To view this data, go to Trends (in the sidebar), then tab through the charts (Last 30 Days, Time of Day, and Time of Week).

Secondly, when you enter an individual blog’s feed, you’ll be able to view specific details by clicking the “Show Details” link to the right side, beneath the Expanded and List View tabs.  You’ll be able to see charts for number of posts each day over the Last 30 Days, posts at different time intervals (similar to the main view), as well as number of posts according to the day of the week (typically Monday through Friday will have the highest posts).  Additionally, you can quickly view the number of Posts Per Week, Subscriber Count (likely only through Google Reader), and the “Last Updated” date.

Individual Feed Stats

Some of these features were only accessible if you tallied up the number of posts at each hour or tracked them through a different method.  Now, all these figures are right at your fingertip, to determine which blogs are the most successful based off the number of posts per day, time of day, day of the week, etc.

Finally, crawl time and errors encountered during the crawl (useful if your feed isn’t displaying properly) will be displayed in this area.

You can read more about the updates on the Official Google Reader Blog.