Trimming the Fat: Reading Fewer Blogs

Three weeks in to my experiment in measuring my Google Reader stats, I have come to the conclusion that there is too much chaff and not enough wheat. This was mainly fueled by two observations:

- The *average* time devoted to a post lately has dipped under 6 seconds. As an average, this seems a little too low.

- I recently found an interesting article on the NY Times that I realized had been in my reader and yet I blew right past it. This is partially due to the fact that the Times only includes a one sentence summary in their feeds in an effort to get you to click through to the site. Still, I would have been more likely to click through if there were fewer items in the inbox.

I'm taking the following two actions:

- I've cut out a couple of high volume feeds (they shall remain nameless).

- I've been more specific with the feeds where I can be. For example, I unsubscribed to the NY Times Opinion feed and replaced it with the specific columnists (David Brooks) and blogs (TierneyLab, Olivia Judson, By Design) that I find myself reading/sharing most often. The author of post is a very useful filter - it's a lot harder to decide whether to read a post or not based solely on the title.

Google Reader Stats, an Update; Plus: Googlegängers

And the moral of the story is: never start work on solving a common problem until you've done your due diligence to make sure there isn't already something out there that will do the trick.

After noticing in my last post that the standard scatterplots available as gadgets in Google Spreadsheets did not allow for multiple values to be plotted, I contemplated spending some time to put together a gadget of my own to do the trick. While this would have no doubt been a great learning experience (maybe I'll try it anyway), that plan was short-circuited when I realized that there was already a type of gadget that could be abused to serve this purpose:



Now the intended use of this gadget is way cooler than what I am using it for, but I'm also a little proud that I was able to hack it to serve my own purposes. It also has the nice feature that any viewer of this site can mess around and put different values on the axes (try it! you know you want to). These settings are not stored in the gadget in any way (try refreshing the page); however, Google has just introduced a way to persist data and presumably settings in a gadget. I wonder if it's effectively creating a shared document or spreadsheet for each instance of the gadget and pulling the data that way, which would be a similar structure as these embedded gadgets, or if it's a different way to store the data entirely.

Ironically, I'll probably share this very post tomorrow when I go through my Reader, thereby altering the stats. How meta!

And speaking of meta: I was just reading about Googlegängers. A play on the German doppelgänger (another one of my favorite words), "Googlegänger" is a neologism coined to describe other people who share your name, preferably that you discover by Googling yourself.

Inspired, I decided to re-Google myself, since it had been a while. I came up with some really great hits. There's Andrew Brett the model, Andy Brett the bird photographer, and, to coin a new phrase, my REVERSE-Googlegänger, Brett Andrew, the musician. So cheers guys, and best of luck.

Google Reader Stats

Inspired by Atul Gawande's advice to "measure something," I decided to start keeping track of how long I spent each day tabbing through items in my Google Reader. Naturally, I have made this process a batch process, done once per weekday.

It has now been one week, so I have five data points. I wanted to see if any strong trends emerged, so I put the data in a Google Spreadsheet, publicly available here. I'm still tooling around with it, but I was also excited to try out the gadget feature, which should let me embed the two charts I came up with right on my blog as gadgets:





Nothing tremendously interesting or pretty, but for right now I just wanted to see if the pipes could be connected so to speak.

One thing I noticed was that the standard scatterplot falls victim to standard scatterplot syndrome: you can only display two values on it, i.e., you can't make the points sized or colored based on a third or fourth column of values.

Thing is, there's a developer's API for these things, but currently there are no available charts that allow for this multi-dimensional type of scatter plot. I wonder if this is something that one could knock out in a weekend...