So, the new Google reader is pretty cool, although I have to say that I liked the old look better.

But here’s what’s most intriguing to me…

…Did you notice that as you scroll through the lists of posts that the number of unread items goes down? Now, I’m totally daunted at the thought of trying to deconstruct Google’s JavaScript so I haven’t even attempted to ‘peek under the hood’. However, from a purely presentation point-of-view, it would seem that they might be using ‘onFocus’ to mark each item scrolled/scanned/read as read.

Why is that intriguing? Well it takes me back to a discussion I took part in back at Emetrics in April. The point of the conversation, to put it melodramatically, is that ‘the page view is dead’. One of the discussion participants declaimed that he wasn’t interested in page views because a single page might include multiple news items that he wanted to measure.

So if Google is using something of the sort I describe, couldn’t they easily hook that interaction into Google Analytics with a whole new metric? Something called ‘Post View’ or something less prosaic? Isn’t that we harp about when complaining about measuring Web 2.0/AJAX/RIA?

Here are some questions that pop up in my head while thinking about this:

1. Does onFocus equate to a person actually reading the post? When Eric Peterson launched his new vendor discovery RSS feed over the weekend, I quickly scrolled through about 50 posts in Google Reader but only actually read about 5 because I wasn’t really interested in which random site was using which random analytics tool
2. Are there any studies that show what the average time to read 50, 100, 200, 500, etc. words online is?
3. If such data as the above exists or could be executed with some rigor, could a combination of onFocus and time spent on that focus more accurately measure ‘engagement’ with an individual post?
4. What kind of KPIs might we drive out of the above scenario?

I guess if Peterson ever gets the “Virtual Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group” organized I can ask these questions there, but until then I leave them for you to ponder.