Follow Me

In the spirit of meshed online communities like FaceBook, MySpace, and Orkut, Blogger now gives us a new accessory: Following. With a single mouse click, you can subscribe to any Blogger blog by its news feed, and create a link from that blog back to your profile. You can read the contents of Blogger blogs that you Follow either in your Following Reading List, or in Google Reader.

Do you see the "Follow Me" gadget, in the sidebar? There you can see two components of Following.

• A link to add this blog to your Following Reading List.
• A grid of thumbnail profile photos, showing who most recently decided to Follow this blog.

Two more components are on your Dashboard, as your account gets the Following feature.

• For each Followed blog, a link to a list of who is Following that blog.
• Your Following Reading List, showing blog content (snippets of ~150 posts), at the bottom of the dashboard.

If a blog that interests you has the "Followers" ("Follow Me") gadget, just click on the "Follow This Blog" link, to add this blog to your Reading List, at the bottom of your dashboard. If there's no "Followers" gadget, but the blog is public and has a working feed, just go to your Reading List, and click on the "Add" button. Either way, you'll become a Follower of that blog (though the latter choice won't be as much fun).

If you want Followers for your blog, be sure to enable the blog feed. Once that's done, add a Followers gadget to your sidebar, and make it visible (near the top is best). Encourage people to Follow your blog, and you'll get more Followers.

I'm sure there's a reason why the "Start Following" link and the Followers gallery are separate from the dashboard Followers list and the Reading List - but that's a detail known only to Blogger. It's kewl to look in my blog, and see who's Following my blog. Why isn't there at least a link in the Following gadget, to take me directly to my Reading List?

I have to access my dashboard, to check out the content of my Reading List. Convenient access to my Reading List, I would think, will be key to the usefulness of Following. And frankly, I would prefer to be able to peruse my Reading List, without being distracted by my dashboard blog inventory.

Where this goes from here will be interesting to observe (or Follow). There aren't a lot of options for Following right now; hopefully there will be some choices later how we want to see the Followed blogs, and how we want to be Followed. Maybe the choice to selectively display some (or all) blogs as Followed, to our other Followed and Followers, or even to the Blogosphere in general, would be good. And not everybody likes being Stalked, so maybe there should be a choice to reject anonymous Followers.

What use is it to Follow, and to be Followed, if you can't tell the world (or to tell a part of the world, selectively) what you're doing? But you need to protect yourself.

For a more descriptive and pictorial evaluation of Following, you might want to check out Roberto's Following - A new Gadget. You may also benefit from Blogger: What is Following?.

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