When Google Reader unveiled their Trends page a few weeks ago, the blogosphere was abuzz with the possibilities of what could happen if that attention data were aggregated… could Google Reader’s database of most-starred or most-shared items become a competitor to sites like Digg and Netscape?
As I was plowing through feeds this morning I realized that for the way I use Google Reader, that data won’t mean much. According to my Trends stats, I read about 800 items a day… obviously I’m quickly scrolling through. I use the Star feature to mark items that are interesting enough to potentially become blog topics, bookmarks, etc… essentially it’s my “follow up” list. If something is interesting, but not worthy of blogging, I’ll use the Share feature to put it into my linkblog. At any given moment, I won’t have very many starred items. If Google ranks an article’s popularity based on how many times it has ever been starred, and not just if it’s starred at the moment, that might work.
If Google is going to create this meta attention data, the other item which needs consideration is clickthroughs… how many times was a blog post actually opened to the original site.
