Back in January, NewsGator made their desktop feed readers free in order to expand their audience and therefore gather more "attention" data. Rather than just using the information to improve their enterprise products, they're giving something back to all readers:

Today, we released a feature based on that data.

At the top of the NewsGator Online reader, you’ll see a “Sort” option. When you click it, you’ll see the “Sort By Activity” option. If you choose that, you’ll see something like the display [above] when you click on a feed or folder.

Your unread posts will be sorted based on total user activity in NewsGator’s online reader, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, and Go!. The green bar gives a graphical view of the total activity based on a scale much like the decibel system.

By the way, what do decibels (sound levels) have to do with blog posts? It's the difference between a linear scale (1, 2, 3, 4...) and a log scale (1, 10, 100, 1000...).

Logarithmic scales allow one to examine values that span many orders of magnitude without losing information on the smaller scales. ...

Many aspects of nature are logarithmic. The human eye responds to changes in light intensity on a logarithmic scale. Since the difference in light intensity between sunlit areas and shade is so great, if your eyes did not work on a logarithmic scale, you would never be able to discern details in the shade!

A more familiar example is the logarithmic response of the human ear to changes in sound intensity. No doubt you know that the sound level of your stereo is measured in decibels (dB). The decibel is a logarithmic unit designed to reflect the response of the human ear. Each additional decibel represents a factor of 1.26 in sound intensity.

(Here ends the science lesson.)