Follow Your Favorite Blog: New Feature Launch by Google for Blogger and Google reader

Sep 11, 2008 by Vivek

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Follow your favorite blog I haven’t seen such high frequency of blogposts from Google on their blog. However, it’s for good most of the time and just recently Google introduced a new feature which is more or less like having a fan club on your blog. This feature is called as “Follow your favorite blogs” and what it does is it displays a list of people on the blog who are following a that blog.

It’s a good way to show the world that you have readers and followers. It works with Blogger and can be integrated as feeds in your Google Reader as well. When you have enabled this Gadget from your blogger dashboard it appears as a widget on your blog. I am not trying to confuse you. That’s the exact vocabulary Google has (Gadgets when you are inside the blogger dashboard and widget when you are on the blog).

The gadget inside the blogger dashboard looks like this and you can add it to your blog.

Follow your favorite blog

The widget that appears on your blog after you have added the gadget, looks like this (I have no blogger based blog so taking this image from Google’s official post):

Follow your favorite blog

I tried to my smartness to pull out how the javascript code looks like:

You can also add the blogs that you are following to your Google Reader and actually start following your currently subscribed blogs in your Google Reader. It’ll create a folder inside your Google Reader and will look something like this:

Follow your favorite blog

Let’s see what connotation is has for all the parties. For the bloggers it’s a good way to show off the fan following they have and get into the race of having more. For the blog readers it’s a great place to see the like minded people and also find out what other blogs they are following. For Google I guess it’s a way to get all the information about which reader is reading what blog (because good number of readers don’t use Google Reader to subscribe to feeds from blogs) and hence making that information searchable adds to it’s mission. I am not sure how it impacts the revenue generation model.

I really think that it’s a very smart and useful feature. Only thing that I did not enjoy much is that Google should also allow Gravatar support. So people who have no Google account can still be shown as followers.