For more than a year, Google Reader has let users know which blogs and RSS feeds are those they read and share most frequently. About a month into LinkRiver's being in the public sphere, the shared item aggregator launched a similar functionality, letting us see not only the topmost 25 shared sites, but also the top 25 most shared keywords. The development comes as developer Adam Stiles continues to quietly expand the site and make it a serious challenger in a growing field.(See: Adam Stiles: LinkRiver Adds Attention Data)
As discussed in February, LinkRiver is primarily focused on gathering your RSS streams from Google Reader shared items, del.icio.us and other services, letting you act as a human filter for the best of the Web. Through LinkRiver, you can subscribe or "follow" others, and let their streams mix with yours to make a river.
And now, looking at my own statistics, by adding both my Twitter feed and the RSS feed for louisgray.com to my LinkRiver, I've artificially overweighted both services, making me look like a serious egomaniac.Via LinkRiver/Louis: Attention, we find the sites I share most often includes the A-listers like Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch and Read Write Web, but also B-listers including Steven Hodson and Frederic Lardinois. My top keywords included big companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, but also FriendFeed (at #7), FeedBurner (at #14), ReadBurner (at #24) and LinkRiver (at #25).
Unique to LinkRiver, so far as I'm aware, is the ability to see the same data for other users of the service. I can see that Frederic shares ValleyWag a lot more than I do, and enjoys both BlogHerald and LifeHacker. I can also see that Paul Buchheit shares items from VentureBeat, Marc Andreesen, and Andrew Sullivan.
The shared attention sites are available not just for the active users of LinkRiver, but the seed accounts as well. You can look in on such folks' activity as Jeremy Zawodny, Nick Bradbury, Daryl Tay, and Chris Brogan, for instance.
Unsurprisingly, LinkRiver's data on me is fairly in line with what Google Reader reports, given the high overlap. But it's more comprehensive than Google Reader, thanks to LinkRiver's incorporation of other services. The data is good to see, and something I think other aggregators, such as FriendFeed, would be wise to follow.