Is anyone else having trouble using Google reader with Craigslist? It hasn't been updating for me at all. Which is unfortunate because I really need it to work right now since I'm looking for a job and an apartment.

2-7offsuit

This is sort of off topic, but is probably useful for people that don't like having old unread things in their google reader. Anyway, if you go to the Goodies section of the settings page, you can add a bookmarklet which, when clicked on, takes you to your most recent unread item. The section of the page is labeled "Put Reader in a Bookmark." I find it very useful because I just middle click a bunch of times on the bookmarklet in my bookmarks toolbar and it opens up tabs of lots of unread items. I also turned on "Scroll Tracking" on the Preferences section of the settings page, which marks items as read as you scroll past them. This makes it really easy to get through a lot of content, since it marks something as read as you scroll past it even if you don't want to read it. Hope this helps someone...

strabes

What we need from Google Reader Trends is not just a 'Top 40' list, but a 'Bottom 40' list so you can see which feeds you read the least.
Of course, what do you want for nuthin'?

yagameister

I go through all my items, though- the articles are in full view mode, and I just scroll past the ones that don't interest me.

Reilaos~

I can't believe YOU read more CrunchGear than LH. I'm a bit confused there :P

Danny

[Puts on tinfoil hat]
Doesn't this require you to allow Google to follow and track your behaviour? Sorry if that's a DUH kind of a question but I don't know for certain as I almost never use GR because it's butt-assed ugly.

I don't want to give out any more information than I need to, so I guess if I use this reader or any other I will simply have to self-analyse my activities and pare down the list of RSS feeds manually.
[Removes tinfoil hat]

Nuclear Moose

I did this very thing last week to create a "Top Read" folder that sits above everything else. I included my Top 10 feeds as well as particular favorites for each individual "genre". This way, if I find myself bogged down with feeds after a particularly busy day, I have a select group of "must-reads" and don't feel so bad about just giving everything else the old Shift+A (as any major stories will just be repeated in the other blogs, anyway.)

windmillninja

@Reilaos~: agreed. Everything is read 100% I just scroll through the 30% that doesn't interest me

simmo

@Reilaos~ & simmo: Not quite agreed. I do it the same way as you two, but I can still barely keep up with my feeds. Because of this, all of my feeds are at 95% read or more, making the trends useless. I need to know how many of them I open the full article for. Then I can have some real information about which ones I actually read.

nomadwolf

Adam, thanks a ton for mentioning my post here! :-)

maheshexp

Unfortunately, Lifehacker itself probably falls into the category of "delivers too much content for me to keep up with." And that's with a carefully composed feed URL full of not: clauses. :( I love the feed; just wish the bar was a bit higher, I guess.

Robert J. Walker

@yagameister: yaga's right. i have around 50-60 feeds and i can only view my "most read", not "least read." the only thing i use trends for is to delete feeds that haven't been active for an extended period of time.

bigdaddyp16

Hm.. one question:

If I mark a RSS article as read, Google counts it and thinks I have read the article. How can I simply delete an article that I don't like?

Or how does the trend thing work?

Sorry, for this stupid question, but every single offline news reader offers a "delete" option... but I can't find it on Google Reader. Am I just blind?

Marco

@Marco: having a delete/remove item in google reader is a cute suggestion!

@coonj: timing is really a great stuff, but I guess, just for simple question 'what blog you like & read the most?', count is just enough.

Timings are useful when the question like "what kind of article are you interested in Lifehacker.is it techi, or is it zen kind of stuff etc!!".

Wonder not, even timings could be a part of trends in future!!! ;-)

maheshexp

@Marco: I thought the same thing. I use the 'J' and 'K' buttons to go through each feed, which marks everything as read. Unless Google is tracking time I spend on each item to determine if it was read, then my Trends are not accurate.

coonj

@maheshexp: The winner for "Blog I like and read the most" will be the one that has the most posts. Congrats LH

coonj

@Marco, @coonj, @nomadwolf: If you click the "Mark All as Read" button at the top of the page instead of actually opening an item Google doesn't count this as read when calculating trends. Don't ask me why they do that but I discovered this when trying to figure out how to "delete" items.

It annoys me mentally to have a huge number of of "unread" items staring at me. I switched my sorting to automatic (which I believe is based on your trends instead of date) and browse through items in list view from the "All Items" folder. When I'm done for the time being I click "Mark All As Read" to rest reading experience.

*Note: this doesn't seem to be true when using reader mobile from the iPhone. Marking all as read will count those items as read in the trends. Annoying.

simplynutty

I agree with a lot of people above, I get like 150-250 posts a day, and I scroll through all of them, but I only read like, 10-15% max (so yeah, your lucky I'm even here to comment ;))
What would help for me, was stats about which posts I actually CLICKED, where I WENT to the site, because that's the ones I actually visit :-)

jarlen

I use Google Reader's widget in iGoogle, and since only the title shows up until I click on it, the stats are mostly accurate.

Another plus with using the widget is that I can go through a large number of posts easily and only open it if the title looks interesting. Plus, once I click "Mark All As Read," I never see them again - unless I go to the Google Reader page, of course.

wallmalker1

@simplynutty: Using this idea with @wallmalker1's idea, I just started doing this instead: using the List View. You can read the titles, read the ones you want then mark the rest as read, and only the ones you actaully opened are used in Trends.

coonj

@coonj: Headlines aren't nearly as helpful as being able to read the first couple sentences in an article. I've tried the list view before. Thumbs down. :P

nomadwolf

@simplynutty:

Seems only to work if I disable

"In expanded view, mark items as read when you scroll past them"

in the settings menu".

Marco

Thank you guys, I'm gonna try "Mark All as Read" from now on. Doesn't make much sense in my opinion lol but if it't the only way...

Marco

Adam, I would love to see your shared items feed in GR. Do you have one ?

NellIdomeneus

What is interesting is that Scoble predicted Google Reader would be a social bookmarking application in 2006.

You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here's the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.

Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.

What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.

The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.

Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can't change your title tag.

After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.

[www.keywebdata.com]

It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.

If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.

Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.

One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.

ChrisLang