October
2
2006
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:
- 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
- Are there any studies that show what the average time to read 50, 100, 200, 500, etc. words online is?
- 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?
- 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.
Quick un-technical answer: One of the first thing I did in the new Google Reader incarnation is to go under Settings/Preferences and uncheck “Scroll tracking”, which is “In expanded view, mark items as read when you scroll past them.”
Your questions are interesting! Even if a post is in the current focus, nothing tells you the person is actually reading it. However, in expanded view, you should notice the framed color around an individual post changes as you scroll. A nice touch from Google. I think the idea of “onFocus” + time could have some meaning, but “time” should be ajusted based on the post length.
Some KPI:
- ratio of focus time to post length (longer post/longer focus, shorter post/shorter focus, but ratio tells us how much attention was awarded to an indiviual post)
- feed depth (out of X new posts, how many were read?)
- in this case, could the notion of “page view” be replaced by “post view”?
This always remind me of “The Attention Economy” by Davenport. We used to try to get attention to our sites, now we try to get attention to individual posts!
S.Hamel
http://shamel.blogspot.com
Stéphane,
thanks for the comment!
I too think that focus+time would need to be adjusted per the length the post, hence my question about the average time needed to read certain numbers of words on a screen – my full post view might only be your 3/4 post view.
I like your suggested KPIs, especially the first one.
I don’t think that page view is superceded by post view, just that the audience is different. If I’m the Google Reader Product Manager, then page views to the Google Reader are probably still important to me, but if I’m the blogger, post views is more important. Both the aggregator (Google Reader) and the content provider (blogger) would be interested in all metrics both page-centric and post-centric but what they focus on and find most valuable will be different.
-Clint
I was just moving my rss feeds from my homepage of Google to the reader and I noticed this post as I was migrating instantcongnition. I was always annoyed that I did not have the capability to release a feed once I had read it with it being posted to the Google homepage. I agree that the attention is key and the not the pageview.
Corkage ;~), so you would say that Google has an opportunity for better integration between their reader and the reader widget for the home page?
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