Google Reader just added a Reader Trends feature that highlights blog posts users have read, starred, and shared in the past 30 days.
A post by Paris Lemon Blog, via Digg: What’s completely clear now is that the user statistical data is there and ready to go…the question is how long until Google utilizes it to showcase the ‘most starred’ or ‘most shared’ of Google Reader?
The Google Reader Blog announcement describes Reader Trends as an efficiency tool to allow users to identify subscriptions wanting removal or a catch-up read.
I have found the latest release of stats from the Google Reader very interesting; Matt Cutts had a good take on this earlier today.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/new-reader-trends-page/
RSS feeds are a great way of building up a profile of user the number of feeds; the quality; the sector e.t.c. Google should utilize (if they are not already) into the natural search algorithm. It surely makes sense that a feed that widely read by a million of users should appear at the top of a search query.
google reader? new google service? 🙂
What are you trying to figure out when you read anything? You are
looking simultaneously for relevance and meaning. That is, as you read
you think how information adds to what you already know and if it has
any intrinsic interest. This is how you put value to new knowledge.
But how does web-based knowledge get rated? How do we tap into new
opinion and know that it is currently definitive?
Web knowledge is certainly out there as a plethora of search engines
attest. But it is so simplistically rated. You get stars, numbers,
funky pics and have to choose how many you think your read is worth.
Rating has gone no further because eyeballing and attention span need
to be captured quickly. We don’t want to fill out qualitative surveys.
We are time-poor, with remarkably diminishing attention spans.
OK. So how to capture that fleeting attention ? What if search results
had another layer that ranked not on clicks, flicks, stars or bangles,
but on the type of thinking in the writing? Your search would return an
objective list ranked against measurable criteria, not scattergun words
like: good, very good, excellent or just what someone else sent you
because they thought it was worth reading.
Think of search right now as a take out order gone wrong: ‘I want a
burger with tomato, cheese, lettuce only. I want a Coke and Pepsi as
well’. You get a burger with the lot: triple cheese, onion, double
beef, but no lettuce. You get Pepsi but no Coke. In other words, search
has no rigour because it cannot find and rank the value of the needle
in the haystack.
The guys at Oracep Technologies have worked out what you do when you
try to rank what you read. They call this Coning. Number one on your
search result will be what you ordered, and it will be number one
because its opinion and judgement will be worth a read: http://www.oracep.com