I'm in love with Google Reader's "trends" data. But it needs to go further. 
The key statistic is the "% Read" data. What would be great would be building an attention algorithm which would use a mixture of Items Read and an average of the feed's item read time divided by post length (count the number of spaces). Perhaps I should install Attention Monitor.
Anyway, what I gather from my attention data in Google Reader is that I read 99% of what is published on Scripting News but only 52% of what appears on Valleywag. I wish Google would make available a list of my 'low hanging fruits' when it comes to attention, so I could consider whether I want to continue subscribing to them. Putting this data in to their OPML files would be even better!
Danny Ayers will be pleased to note that Raw is my most frequently 'starred' blog (it's a mixture of the RDF geekery and the cats). Butterflies and Wheels gets second place.
What does this kind of data prove? We need more options for feed geeks. We need more and more ways of viewing feeds. We need more ways to slice them up into smaller chunks. We need to have inter-feed dependence options. So, for instance, I'm subscribed to the comments feed for Scripting News. It's generally a good read. But it would probably be useful if the comments feed didn't appear until after I'd read the relevant blog entry. We need feeds to scale up and down organically. I haven't got masses of time to read feeds, but I do want to be told about the important stuff that's going on.
I write this not because it's particularly innovative. It's not. Steve Gillmor and friends have been, for better and worse, drumming the gospel of attention in to people's heads for a while now. I'm writing this because I know that there are smart people reading this blog who will flick through this post, take what it says in to their subconscious and then have a eureka moment while on the loo or waiting for a train or something.
When I'm next in a stationers, I'm going to buy a loose-bound pad of plain paper. At the top of each page, I'm going to put the date. It's going to be like a diary, but more of an attention diary. It's not about my personal feelings, nor about the information. It's to sort of synthesise what is going on and make it both more concrete and more abstract. Can't quite explain. At the end of a month, I'll look back and try to figure out how to codify that in to software. I'd love it if more people tried this - have a note pad and start jotting out of the subconcious while engaging in feed reading, blogging, digging, bookmarking, outlining and so on. Think of it like a little science experiment - it might help us understand what is going on with attention. It might not. Any interesting conclusions should be sent by return postcard. 
