Library clips

So I heard Google Reader has a trends feature, the basic premise is that it is recording the feeds I pay attention to and letting me know about it, what it isn’t doing is actioning on that, it will let me decide that.

What I mean is that it is not going to delete feeds I don’t read often or feeds that don’t post frequently or reshuffle the rank/order of my feeds, it’s just letting me know.

I am really excited about this feature, as it is telling me my top 10 (based on stories I read), this is kind of bias if a feed you read doesn’t post that often…but it is giving more than I need to make some feed management decisions.
We all have feed overload and management issues, so this is a handy tool to crop stuff out, and I won’t feel sad to let go, as I know based on activity that it’s time to say bye. In contrast, it may be time to reshuffle feeds, create new folders, etc…

NOTE: You can set-up your feed reading to auto-sort, ie. set it so less active feed items are on top.
You can also sort your items to read them in reverse, ie. starting with the oldest items

Features

Summary - eg. From your 303 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 859 items, starred 6 items, and shared 0 items.

Reading Trends - Top 10, 20, and 40 feeds based on the number of items “read” (also gives %)
It also gives these statistics for items “starred” and items “shared”, basically this is an aspect of personalisation.

Tag cloud - how many items a tag has the bigger it is, the more I’ve read the darker it is
Tags are folders you organise your feeds in (the output of these can be automated into a public stream)…you can also manually tag items

Chart - a bar chart of the number of items read in the last 4 weeks (a bar for each day)…also shows which day of the week I read a lot or which days I don’t read at all eg. the weekend is always zero for me…also shows what time of day I read the most and vice versa.

This chart not only tells me about my feed reading, but tells me about my productivity/time management (I may look at this chart and say to myself do I do anything else with my time but read feeds…

Subscription Trends - Top 10, 20, and 40 frequently updated feeds based on items per day, and shows the Inactive feeds (giving the last updated date).
Basically I can get a picture of the heavily posting feeds, which I have done and put them in their own folder, I can also see the feeds that are inactive and perhaps delete them or put them in a dead folder.

What’s next!

Recommendation - I can see this information from all users being aggregated to recommend you feeds and items, eg. “here are people that clip the same items as you, or read a lot of the feeds you do, so go check out their user page, and easy add feeds, clip blogs, add the feed of their whole account, clip items, etc…”

In turn there will be a feed folksonomy (or even something like SYO) and an item folksonomy, as well as both an item and feed Community Top 10 (also by topic)…basically the inevitable progession like Rojo to a top buzzing stories stream with perhaps memetracking to boot, or even memedigging by aggregating the “shared” feature.

Social network - connect the system so you can find people and view a users RSS Reader, view clip blogs and see all this stuff in aggregrate…also easy add as a friend button, and easy add clip blogs button.

Wishlist

- manually order the feeds in a folder, and I wish I could manually order the folders (also you can’t rename folders)

- collapse similar stories like Google News and Feeds2.0, this way I can read the lastest buzz around a post in one clean sweep, instead of in chunks as I go through my reader (basically a type of personal memetracking).

This can also be done by viewing content by wordburst tags.

- search (limit by folder, limit by tag…even be able to select feeds or folders to search)…more

- see comments for a post and be able to post a comment from within Google Reader, then perhaps track the conversation ensuing within Google Reader instead of using a 3rd party like co.mments.

- a scratch pad like Gritwire, or maybe being able to send a post to Google Notebook, now that would be awesome as one of my notebooks is used to collect links for future posts, each section heading in this notebook is a future post. I wish I had a bookmarklet for this to add stuff (to a section heading within a notebook) while I’m surfing the web, the extension does the trick I suppose. As I said, sending an item to a section heading in a notebook from within Google Reader would be the bomb.

- another view of your public streams from your non-folder tags (just your manual tags)…another view would be like a traditional bookmark view

- unique export OPML, ie. an OPML with my user name in the URL, also the same for each folder

- include attention data in the OPML, perhaps a dynamic (always changing) OPML for your Top 10 Reading Trends…kind of like a http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/08/28/grazing-conversations/“>feed grazer (subscribe or import your current Top 10 Reading Trends OPML, or subscribe to its spliced feed).

Imagine a Top 10 grazing list for the whole of the Google Reader community, great for feed shopping, or even a grazing list of feeds from the Top 10 items…more and more.

- clip blogs to look like a real blog

- desktop version that synchs (now that’s asking a bit much)

Check out the wishlist at Web Worker Daily.

I’m really convinced that Google Reader is here to stay, right now there’s no better…a lot of readers have their time in the spotlight, but Google Reader is doing everything right, especially the fundamental thing of reading feeds with ease in the shortest time possible…not sure if anything will outshine it.

Maybe my wishlist will be more well received in the forum.

Related:
Google Reader, clipmarks and SuprGlu splice up
Google Reader and clipping in general