Google's Blogger service is looking to get in on the blog-as-social-network phenomenon that software like Moveable Type and WordPress have recently started pushing. Blogger announced earlier this week that users will now be able to "follow" each other within the service.
A new widget will soon be available that allows you to display all your followers on your Blogger page. That should be good news for the spammers and scammers that rule Blogger, offering them yet another way to try to appear legitimate.
Of course it should also be good news for the handful of legitimate Blogger users who want to keep track of who's following them.
The feature will be rolled out incrementally and is opt-in. If you want to enable it, head over to your Blogger dashboard and see if it's available for your account. If not, be patient, the Blogger Buzz blog says it should be available in the next few weeks.
If you happen to use Google Reader as well, there's also a new special folder in Reader called "Blogs I'm Following," which lists all RSS feeds for the Blogger blogs you follow.
However, while it's a step in the right direction, the "following" features are limited to just your fellow Blogger users, which makes them somewhat less useful since that's probably only a small slice of your actual audience.
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