I don’t know about you but I have been noticing less and less content in my Google Reader lately, probably a few months – but I bet the trend has been going on longer.  I subscribe to 200+ RSS feeds and haven’t added many in the last 6 months (I realize there will be some churn in who is creating content) but I’m convinced it’s more like a fundamental shift in content consumption than the particular feeds I happen to subscribe to.

Figured I would use Reader.Google.com (Google Reader) and look at the trends in my own consumption first – but the trends are only for the last 30 days, they don’t cover a year or two timeframe I need.

Proving that RSS is on it’s way out isn’t an easy  – I tried finding “Google Reader” in Comscore, and could not locate it, it’s not captured in Alexa at all, as a subdomain of Google and it’s very incompletely captured by Compete.com.   But the data in Compete doesn’t draw a clear picture that RSS feeds are being less consumed – though I did find one indicator they might well be – the average stay  was 18 seconds in duration last year and 13 seconds this August (the latest month Compete has data on as of today).

Now, I don’t claim this “13 seconds” of time spent per visit per month  matches the real time spent in a visit – but it might suggest that consumption of information has, indeed, shifted away from RSS feeds to Facebook, FriendFeed (and FriendFeed was bought by Facebook recently) and Twitter.

It’s much as Steve Rubel of Edelman predicted.

We’re talking about a lot less time being spent on Google Reader – but far more time spent in Twitter and Facebook – where much of the same information is available and linked to.

I’m suspecting this is what happened.   Sure, sometimes I’ll go to bed and wake up and find 600+ new items my Google Reader to consume, if I want – but lately, I’ll go to bed and wake up and may 100 or 200 items are present for me to read the next day.

I think there’s been a fundamental shift in how information is consumed that’s taken hold.  I wish the rest of the data I looked at was as clear as the two charts I placed above – but they’re not.

New features of Google Reader (see Google Reader: Now with More Social! ) allow you to identify target audiences by what they already like or favor:

” …. And in a move that looks a heck of a lot like Facebook, Google Reader also add the “like” button to the bottom menu of its stories:

Here’s how it works – you take strong content that has a known audience such as Paul Krugman‘s OP-ED and posts at the New York Times.

1. Most readers of Paul Krugman are probably democrats
2. The same readers who favor Paul Krugman think the 2009 Stimulus Package is inadaquate for the country’s needs.
3. Most readers of Krugman think the previous administration were crooks.

With those three points in mind we can look at Paul Krugman’s recent posts and find out who likes them.

It would help if Google Reader had a sorting by the number of “most liked” posts in a category, but it doesn’t yet.

However, as the “like” button was just added recently AND does not appear on all mobile applications of Google Reader (like the iPhone, where I do most of my Google Reader reading) there’s a lot of information that’s not being collected yet.  In time, say over the next year, I believe we’ll get to 60-70% of all those reading RSS feeds in Google Reader to have their likes recorded – but right now, that’s not the case.

Once you have settled on the content, in his case, Paul Krugman, just  go through every Paul Krugman post, get all the names, de-duplicate, and then look at the articles each have read.

At this point, the process would me manual, but I’d imagine, tools could be written to do this much faster.

The last part is most important – you can carefully contact people in you “list” for persmission – but here’s at least, a way to build a list based on what some actually likes.

Once you build a list, gradually, maybe spending 15-20 hours on it – and you can come up with 400-500 profiles to contact while looking at the details of what they “liked” will confirm your choices.  You’ll still need to figure out the best way to contact other readers – probably by first following them in Google Reader – go look at their public Google Profile and then request to contact them.

In a way, Facebook could have done the same thing – but they haven’t, as far as I can tell.

It’s all in how it’s done – weather it violates privacy or not is how people are contacted and if they are giving their permission to have a dialog – if they haven’t then it a violation of privacy – but if they have, then you can approach – with this new “house list”.

Steve Rubel wrote a interesting post about using the new enhancements in Google Reader to do Knowledge Management and Research titled Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader.

While I haven't really used it that way, I could see where it could be useful for Social Media Standards research – much in the way he suggests and I'm going to look into using it that way.  Steve suggests subscribing to many, many feeds, not so much to read them all, but to data-mine them for keywords, which you can do now..

* The Core Philosophy: Google Reader is a database and a feed reader
* Continually add tons of feeds in organized, methodical way
* Establish a taxonomy that makes retrieval and sharing easy using on-the-fly tagging
* Annotate your data by connecting Reader to Gmail or Blogger
* Putting it all together – sorting, searching and sharing