Analytics and statistics can provide a lot of valuable information about the visitors to your website.  That information can, in turn, help you plan content, promotions, and site design.  But stats and analytics aren't just for website traffic anymore. According to the Office Google Reader Blog and Matt Cutts, Google Reader has been updated to include some pretty nifty analysis tools for your subscribed RSS & Atom feeds.

The new Trends page, which can be accessed from the "Home" section of Google Reader, provides the following information about your reading habits:

• How many subscriptions you have, how many articles you've read, starred, and shared
• The number of items read by day, time of day, and day of the week
• Your "Reading Trends", which shows how many articles you've read, starred, and shared from each feed
• "Subscription Trends", which gives you an overview of the most active and inactive feeds you're subscribed to

This information is, first and foremost, interesting to look at.  It puts your reading habits into perspective and could be a little surprising.  Would you ever have guessed that you'd read 3127 articles in the last 30 days?  Or that you all but ignore Google Reader on Fridays?  Besides just being interesting, the Trends page can help you better manage and control your feeds.  With the growth of RSS and related technologies, most people who use feed reading services have started acquiring quite a list of feeds.  Maybe there are a few that don't update enough to worry about.  It'd also be easy to figure out which feeds you've subscribed to but hardly ever read.  Maybe it's time to delete a few inactive or unread feeds?

House keeping can really help streamline your reading time and this Trends page makes that house keeping much simpler.