Analyzing Your Reading Habits
Jan 4th, 2007 by Dan Blank
Google enveiled an interesting feature to its RSS reader. It allows you to analyze your reading habits, if you use their RSS service.
Matt Cutts shows an example of his habits - which feeds he reads most and when. This already seems to be fueling a war for bragging rights:
“I’ve read 2000+ blog posts from 80+ feeds in the last 30 days. Booyah!”
Steve Rubel asks a scary question:
“Now imagine if they were turn this information around and sell it to marketers. Thankfully, I bet their privacy policy prohibits it.”
I use a tool to do something similar for me already called Qlockwork (http://www.workingprogram.com). Full disclosure: I’m a developer on Qlockwork so I’m a bit biased.
Apart from the obvious “what did I do, when did I do it” question, one of the most useful features of any tool like this is the ability to search your own clickstream. Let’s say you remember that you saw a good deal on web hosting a few months back but weren’t interested in it then, so you didn’t bookmark it. Now you want to go back and look at it again, so you bring up your Qlockwork/Google activity history and search it for the link.
I suspect this angle is what interests Google about the idea (after all, they can then advertise a lot of other web hosting to you with your search results). Google don’t really need to sell your data to marketeers, they are already the most powerful meta-marketers around. They only need the data themselves so target Google Ads
Again, I’m biased but I think Qlockwork has one up on Google here, because it captures everything you do on your PC, not just browsing. So, you have greater data and context for your search. Qlockwork also has a completely desktop version, so you never need to worry about your data going off PC and being sold to anyone.
Thanks Anne - great point about Google not needing marketers. I have to admit, I am a bit wary of cataloging my whole life into any easily searchable database! I agree, it could be incredibly useful to ensure you don’t miss anything, however, does all this data collection simply create baggage?
Will look into Qlockwork further - thanks, enjoy the weekend.
-Dan