It would have been fruitful to have installed a monitoring app on my system to determine what I have given up over the last 5 months.  I suspect now that Wikipedia, Snopes, and Facebook have taken the brunt of the loss. 

The last time I posted my stats (June 18th) I had read 4,672 items from 110 subscriptions, starring 22, sharing 217 and emailing 4 over the previous 30 days.  

In the last 30 days, I have read 6,053 items (29.5% increase)  from 116 subscriptions (5% increase), starring 56 (154% increase), sharing 209 (3.6% decrease), and emailing 34 (675% increase).

I have also noticed that what I am sharing has changed a bit over time.  Initially I was focused on GTD and lifehacks, now I don’t really have a strategy other than sharing what I find interesting.  

Recommendations weren’t in my top 10 last time, now scobleizer.com’s recommendations & chrisbrogan.com’s recommendations are high on the list.  Probably one of the reasons I find FriendFeed & Twitter so interesting. 

I am not sharing items more frequently than I used too, but I am starring & emailing them more often.  I typically star items to reread and/or research and email those that someone else will find interesting.  While I add feeds on a regular basis, I also prune them frequently too and have resulted in only a net gain of  6 feeds during the last 5 months.

There is a tech focus to what I am reading & sharing right now,  it might be time to expand my RSS subscriptions.  However,  most of the non-tech info (politics, sports, news, general interest) I read comes from FriendFeed and Twitter, so maybe I don’t need to broaden my RSS horizons just yet. 

If you are a Google Reader fan, it’s worth taking a look at your trends, if only to get to know yourself a little better.

Microsoft has released a Technical Preview with some pretty snazzy new additions.  Frederic @ The Last Podcast has already covered the best ones:

1) Improved Category Control (now you can search)

2) Word Count

3) Auto Link Glossary  (auto adds links to popular terms that you’ve previously linked to, like FriendFeed)

4) Lightbox support (if your site uses lightbox)

5) New image controls (like tilt)

I was already impressed with Windows Live Writer and these new features seal the deal.  Tip of the hat to Frederic for posting about the Technical Preview and thereby bringing it to my attention.

• Slightly younger [37.6 years old vs 44.8 years old]
• Slightly better edicated [14.3 years vs 14.2 years]
• Slightly lower income [$55,819 vs $56,811]

Practically a dead heat with the median.

The ethnical breakout of bloggers versus national average:

• White/Caucasian [69.7% vs 76.1%]
• Hispanic [20% vs 14.8%]
• African American [12.2% vs 11.4%]
• Asian [3.7% vs 2.0%]

Of the 26% of U.S. citizen who indicate they blog at least occansionally:

• Gender [53.7% Male - 46.3% Female]
• Marital Status [44.7% Married]

[via MediaPost]

I immediately checked and my directory was open to public browsing.  Using the instructions Jeremy posted about modifying the .htaccess file, I have resolved the issue.  Thanks Jeremy!

Ilya Lichtenstein suggests 8 other uses over at Neomeme.

In addition, I am not a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts. I know they are the holy grail of efficiency, but I like being able to click on next story to move on. At Fastladder you have to keep scrolling or try to remember what the hot key is.

For me, for now, Google Reader is still tops.

Since I rarely update this blog, I am guessing that this level of addiction is based on how many blogs I read and how much time I devote to reading them.

On that subject, I have to give a big thumbs up to Google Reader.

There are plenty of other news readers and RSS aggregators out there, but Google Reader makes sense for me. I already use Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Notebook.