my reading trends

When I fired up Google Reader this morning, I noticed an alert to let me know that Google Trends can now report on my feed subscriptions.

I’m curious to know if a click-through is measured as a “read”. Or is the simple task of scrolling through items in Google Reader, which automatically marks them as read for you as they leave your screen, the sole way to track what you’ve read? Social news sites like digg and Reddit are apparently high on my list. Their feeds typically contain a lot of new items throughout any given day, and most of the time contain only a story’s headline with very little actual content, requiring me to click-through to get to the actual content. I wouldn’t say I actually read too many of them. In the case of say, digg, I click-through to read maybe 2 or 3 a day after skipping the deluge of “Steve Jobs is teh awesome!!!” and “Bush does something stupid again” types of items. Contrast that with items from Coding Horror, The Daily WTF or Life Hacker. I actually read those feeds’ items in their entirety in Google Reader. I don’t have to click through anything; all of the content is right there. Which brings me to a pet peeve…I hate when feeds force you to click-through to read an entire item by including only a sentence or two in their feed. Arg! Lame! Now my train of thought has been derailed. Where was I? Oh yeah. If the trends keep up the way that Google Trends reports them, I’ll be sporting a black mock turtle neck sweater and five o’clock shadow in no time 🙂