RSS feeds have feelings, too

From my 1,490 RSS subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 48,284 items, starred 21 items, shared 5 items, and emailed 11 items. At least, that's what my Google Reader tells me. I spend at least 1,5 hours every day reading my feeds. Often I get up early, skip lunch or stay up late just to catch up with all these updates. In my Google Reader Trends graph above, blue is for Items posted, orange is for Items read. You can see that once in a while I "mark all as read" and read hardly any RSS feeds at all - that's when I'm actually getting a real life ;-)
Unfortunately, the Google Reader interface is rather boring. Which is why I recently installed the Feedly Firefox Add-on (also available as Google Chrome extension). Feedly organizes your favorite sites into a sexy, magazine-like start page. It's based on Google Reader and Twitter. I really like the looks of it, and most importantly: the "j" key for "next" still works. You can tell when I'm reading my RSS feeds when you see my finger tap "J, j, j, j, j," (and an occasional "k" to jump one post back).

Only today I discovered that Feedly also has a feature called Karma: "an experiment we are running to help you get more insight on how people react to the content you are sharing on twitter." Below is part of my Karma page (zooming in on my How to Suck at Facebook tweet):

Compare to the bit.ly info page for this link and you'll see what I mean.