Earlier this week, Nick Harris blogged about the "My Reading Habits" feature he’s adding to the next version of NewsGator Inbox (which, btw, is shaping up to be an excellent release).
This simple report gives an overview of the attention you’re spending on each of your subscriptions. It’s a pretty cool feature, which is why it’s also being added to the upcoming FeedDemon 2.6.
As you can see from the screenshot, lately the majority of my attention has been going to the TopStyle Support Forum, followed closely by the active cases in my FogBugz queue. That’s the way it usually goes when there’s a beta version of one of my applications available – and pretty soon now, my attention report is going to show that I’m paying the most attention to the FeedDemon Support Forum, ‘cos the first beta of FeedDemon 2.6 is in the works :)
It is cool, but… is it useful?
Well, I wouldn’t claim that it’s so useful that it’ll change your life, but yeah, I do find it useful.
For one thing, I just like seeing where my attention is going. But it’s also a good way to find out which feeds I can get rid of because I’m not really paying any attention to them.
I do like this kind of stuff, and it looks great :-)
I think this is a great feature. I’m constantly trying to evaluate which feeds I should prune, and something like an Attention Report would save me time in the process.
From what I read of Nick’s thread, he is tracking forwarded posts. I would also like a count of posts I read or click on the post link (or link within a post?).
There are some high volume feeds that <1% of the messages are of interest, but I scan them anyway. Other feeds I read/click on 90% of the posts…
Hope this helps and keep working on FeedDemon! The concept of having a tool that can synch at home/work/mobile is pretty awesome. And just for the record, I'm an over 50 engineer (ok, I need reading glasses for the Mobile reader…).
-Paul
You’re using Yahoo Pipes for the forums instead of the built-in RSS? What kind of improvements do you get that way?
@Thomas: I use Yahoo Pipes to create keywords searches across all of our forums feeds. That way I can see when someone mentions FeedDemon or TopStyle in any forum, not just their respective support forums.
@Paul, the “Statistics” page in Feed Properties shows you a lot of data, including the number of posts you’ve visited in that feed. The upcoming FeedDemon 2.6 will also track links clicked within posts.
Are you wanting to see that data exposed on the attention report, so you can view it for all feeds at once?
I’d be interested in more detail on how you compute the scores. Nothing that gives away your competitive edge of course but just some generalisations of what you are tracking that amounts to attention.
Hopefully it is not similar to how Google Reader does it as that is quite useless. I use the keyboard to skim through all unread items and Google Reader marks that as paying-attention. So high output blogs that I barely read, but do skim through with the J key, get rated as sources I pay the most attention too.
In my use it is the feeds I click through on that I pay the most attention to.
@Paul: I’m planning to write a blog post about how FD calculates attention – I expect to post it next week.