Sometimes a great feature hides in plain site from me. A great example is the trends link in Google Reader, which I have never checked out for some reason, but now that I did, I want to show you guys what it can do. Basically it’s a statistics factory for your RSS reading habits, which may seem useless or only fun to many people, it does give room for some productivity.

I actually only have about 20 feeds at a time, I tend to root out ones I don’t read often. Now that I looked at the trends, I discovered that there are feeds where I only read about 2% of the material published. Google reader shows you this info in a “top feeds” table where you can see the number of items published in a feed per day, and the percentage of items you actually read. This works really well, since if you have 200 items unread in a feed and simply click “mark all as unread” these won’t count in statistics-wise. o if you’re struggling with hundreds of feeds, why not slim them down a bit? If you read them for entertainment or for work, I think you can safely delete ones where you read only 1-5%.

Another great feature is on the left, where you can see starred, shared and emailed items, grouped by feed, so you can derive the most important feeds in your life, or ones with the most quality posts. For bloggers this could be especially useful, since I do cover stories from others once in a while, and seeing the most quality blogs is a real help.