As information geek, I feed on information. One of the best tools to get the information so far is Google Reader. If you use it, you might know nice Trends page it has - and I want to share some trends about what I read, what I share, who reads my shares and shares of whom I read.

It tells me, that "From your 396 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,855 items, starred 11 items, shared 148 items, and emailed 2 items." I don't know if it is much or not, but given that I read stuff even in public transport I believe that might be more than for many others. It seems, that I share only 3% of stuff I read, not much :).

Feeds



Most popular is my filter on Google-related blogposts at important tech blogs, "Google collected", which I created using Yahoo! Pipes; this pipe, together with official and unofficial Google blogs, allows me to know what's new at or about Google. You can subscribe to it or modify it here. 6 of top 10 feeds are shared items' feeds of my friends, I will speak about them later. Bash.Org.Ru is Russian blog of funny quotes (non-technical mostly). Roem.ru is most interesting Russian technical blog, which covers some inside stuff there. And "Наша Ніва" is the only readable Belarusian newspaper (but their RSS feed is really crappy - items are cropped short and not separated by topics).

People



This is a chart of my friends (and me), sorted by number of subscribers. It's unclear how this number is computed exactly, but for me it's probably just a number of my Google Talk contacts that are using Google Reader. I would like to introduce and recommend some popular people in this list; but since Google Reader still has "obscure" shared URLs, I will not give them; you can see them for those who are on Friendfeed, clicking on little RSS icon under their name, or ask them personally on Twitter, or add them to your Gmail/GTalk chat contacts. All of them share really interesting stuff (though sometimes in languages you might not know..), and I highly recommend them.

Starting with my colleagues at Google:

• Bradley Horowitz - VP of Product Management for Google Apps. You can find him on Twitter and Friendfeed; see his shared feed. Now you know whom to ask about that new Gmail feature :).


• Jeff Huber - SVP of Engineering; also on Twitter and Friendfeed.


• Fernando Delgado is PM for Geo in Zurich; he was the one who wrote the recent post on official Geo blog on "What's here". He is also a good friend and poker player :). You can find him on Friendfeed.


• Meder Kydyraliev and Loic Guelorget are Security Engineers in Zurich; Veselin Raychev is a Software Engineer here too.

Some selected others:

• Yelena Mursya Jetpyspayeva - awesome girl and someone special :). Besides that she is journalist, blogger, editor, specialist in new media, and organizer of BarCamp Central Asia. She is also on Friendfeed and Twitter.


• Petr Didenko - Web Evangelist at Microsoft Russia. Unfortunately, I have only one Microsoft guy in top 20 of Google Reader friends.. is it because it has word "Google" in it? :) His Friendfeed, Twitter.


• Aija and Maksim Berjoza - wonderful couple from Riga, organizers of BarCamp Baltics. On Barcamp in 2009 I met Yelena, in 2008 I met Petr. Interesting, that Aija seems to underutilize her subscriber base most - having 131 subscribers she shared nothing in last 9 months. Maksim is on Friendfeed and Twitter.


• Slaver Radionov has several blogs in Belarusian and Russian. Works as web developer, even though he graduated in History. On Twitter.


• Igor Kandyba is author of the most interesting (or the only?) blog about web technologies in Belarus.

Sorry to those whom I didn't include, I still recommend everybody on this list - you can just search for their names in Google to find contacts. And there are even more - more than 70 people are sharing in Reader with me.

Shares

So, why did I take my time to describe those nice people who share interesting items with me? Look at what I share:



Really, most of the stuff that I share comes from my friends: 14 of 19 feeds that I shared from are my friends' shared items (some of shared items feeds for unknown reasons don't have "Items shared by..." in the beginning, just the name). Apparently, they give me the most interesting stuff to read. They basically help me to filter, to see gems in the vast ocean of information; I am, anyway, subscribed to just 396 small rivers of it, and I can't fully process even these - while out there there are myriads more. Cool, keep sharing going! You can also subscribe to my shares here, and give links to pages of your shares in comments (get it here).

And yes, I am very curious: share screenshots of your Trends pages :).