Following - The Ups And Downs

The new online Blogger community feature - Following - is now over a week old. Most of us who are using it actively, on our blogs, know the euphoria when loading our blog and seeing a new, unfamiliar face

All right - a new Follower!

But check those profiles closely, boys and girls - not all of them are the real thing. I've removed one bogie from my list already, and I'm looking at another 2 which look a bit dodgy.

What better way to pimp your splog, then to Follow a well known blog? What you get, when you Follow another blog, is an automatic backlink, through your profile, to your blog. Talk about a great target for sploggers.

And there are other downsides to the craze. When you add a blog to your Reading List, it's also added to your Google Reader subscription list. If the blog is already on the subscription list, it's now there twice. And conversely, when you remove a blog from your Reading List, it's still there on the subscription list - and it's there twice, if it was there before you started Following it.

So enjoy Following, and being Followed. But watch your followers, and your Google Reader subscription list, carefully.

>> (Update 9/11 17:00): Blogger is slowly improving the Following - Google Reader interaction.

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