Unclutter your Google Reader

Posted by SM in August 17th, 2008

I’m a fan of various blogs and have a habit of subscribing to the feeds of the blogs and sites which I like to read it daily. But over a period of time, my Google Reader got piled up with the lots of RSS feeds. So, now I’ve a difficult time to read each and every RSS items. And most of the news items seems to be duplicated over various blogs and sites.

If you are a beginner to the internet and blog world, you would just have started your subscription and all you have to do is just to know how to manage the subscriptions. But for the advanced readers and the blog addicts, piling of the feeds will happen frequently. Now it is the high time for me to clean up my RSS shelf.

So, the big question is, how do I know which RSS should I get rid of?

Here is the arranged view of my google reader. There are 1000+ items in each section that is still pending with me to read. But I’m sure I gonna click ‘Mark as Read’ and I gonna get rid of all items ( including important and interesting stuff).

Google Reader - List of subscriptions

Now i’ve to clean up all these unnecessary stuffs, but at the same time I can’t miss out my favorite stuffs. Here comes my saviour the Google Reader Trends that helped me to sort out my problem.

Trends Link in Google Reader

The Google Reader trends shows up my reading trend and habit of reading. There are two types of Trends available

Reading Trends
Subscription Trends

Google Reader Trends

Reading Trends

The Reading trends answers the question ‘which feed you are reading the most?‘

The top 5 blogs that I read CrunchGear , Lifehacker, AppleInsider , Engadget and Ars Technica. Also the “#Read” count shows, how many posts you have read in the shown RSS feed and “%Read” shows you how much of the published content you have read. In CrunchGear, i’ve read 24 items, but it is just the 2% of the items that I’ve read from the published content. So I’ve more content to read in CrunchGear. Similarly, in ‘Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa ‘, I’ve read all the items published, which shows 100%

Subscription Trends

The subscription trends, answers the question ‘Are you intrested in blog feeds which publishes huge number of posts per day?‘Subscription trends, shows the frequency of the items getting published from a blog. In Gizmodo, about 46 items published per day but the trends shows that, I don’t ready any of Gizmodo’s item. Also, CrunchGear publishes 32 items per day and I’ve read 2% of the items from CrunchGear. So, even though Gizmodo publishes a large volume of news, I’m not much interested in the news item from Gizmodos. So, I might conclude that I’m not reading the subscription ( but might change in future ) that publishes more than 40 posts per day.

Tagged in My Mind as: Google, Google Reader, Unclutter

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Bruce Keener Said in August 19th, 2008 @8:27 am

Very useful. I’ll probably link to this later week. Good article, especially for those of us who have really cluttered GR with hundreds of feeds.

BTW, I wonder if the trending keeps track when you view feeds via mobile, as I often do on my iPod Touch? My hunch is that it does not, but I do not know for sure.

maheshexp Said in August 20th, 2008 @6:46 am

bruce, GR is a web app and behaves in same way in any device. So, with mobile or with desktop the service is all same.

Andre Said in August 22nd, 2008 @4:49 am

I use AideRSS to filter feeds that publish too much posts like Gizmodo, Slashdot, Engadget and TechCrunch. It’s very effective to keep tracking these sites without getting buried by news.

maheshexp Said in August 22nd, 2008 @8:00 am

Andre, I had a peek into AideRSS after your suggestion. AideRSS seems to be cool. Will try to give it a try..Thanks for a cool suggestion.

Matt Said in August 22nd, 2008 @10:00 pm

Or you could give up RSS all together: http://learnthisproject.blogspot.com/2008/05/information-overload-why-you-should.html

skurt Said in August 26th, 2008 @1:41 am

interesting trends, but as a mostly mobile-reader-reader (via opera mini) and using mark all as read to not see post again the trends are not as powerful as the might should be.