That’s the news from the Googlesphere, that Blogger users will now be able to bring in Google Plus conversations into the comments of their blogs.

On one hand, this makes sense, and might be quite useful for Blogger users who are also active on Google+. I hope they enjoy being able to extend their blog conversations into Plus and vice versa.

On the other hand, this just goes to show how much of Google is a completely closed system. Sure, you can bring in comments from Google owned Plus into Google owned Blogger. But what if you want to bring in comments to Blogger from Facebook, Twitter, etc.? What if, as a WordPress user, you want to bring in comments from Plus?

Look, this is a nice feature for Blogger users, but let’s not kid ourselves. This is also part of Google’s larger strategy to be your one stop “everything” shop, and to share data about you and your actions online across all of their products. Think about it, what better way for Google to target advertising to you (And let’s not forget that at the very base level, Google is an advertising company), than to know what blogs you comment on, and what you have to say, who you’re connected to, what kinds of things are in your email messages, who those are from, what you search for online, what events are coming up on your calendar, and on and on and on? They are creating a profile of you, using the combination of your activities on all of their products, and they are keeping you behind their walled garden when you use those products. Your own site, your Twitter handle, your Facebook or LinkedIn profile? Those don’t belong to Google, and Google can’t take the identity you’ve created on Google’s products to track you in those environments. In a nutshell, allowing interoperability isn’t really in Google’s interest, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it.

While I think it’s cool that they are adding interoperability from Blogger and Plus, wake me when Google actually offers up a public API so the rest of the online world can interact with Plus. Until then, Plus remains just another site I have to login to in order to see what’s happening.

Sorry for the downtime yesterday, and for not being able to explain it until now. It appears that there is a pretty significant botnet attack being directed against WordPress sites, and all of the brute force login attempts were making sites unresponsive.

In order to get the sites back online my host blocked access to the login page. That was great for getting the site online, not so good for me wanting to post any updates, since no one could login.

The hosting company has been great though, and devised a workaround where I’m logging into the site using a renamed login page. Depending on what this might break, I might just consider telling them to leave it this way.

Thanks for getting me back in Jodohost!

So, now that we’ve had a few days to sort of digest the news that Google Reader isn’t going to be around, you may be asking yourself what all the fuss is about. Those of you who’ve never used an RSS reader probably don’t understand what you’re missing by following a site on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or somewhere else, instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Truth is, when you rely on one of those other services, you probably aren’t seeing everything. Facebook is using some weird algorithm to determine what to show you in your newsfeed, and Twitter is only as good as the amount of time you have to keep up with it. Most of you who use Twitter and know this go with the assumption that the “good” stuff will bubble up to the surface when the other people you follow share it to their network and you’ll see it eventually.

Last week, I wrote about how that changes things from a bloggers perspective. I realize now just how significant a portion of the people who follow me on Twitter, or Facebook, etc. really don’t see what I write here unless others happens to start sharing it. Like I said yesterday, that changes the dynamic between myself, and you as a reader. I’m somewhat at the mercy of you and your willingness to share what I write. Oh sure, there will alsways be those of us who conitnue to use RSS readers and subscribe to feeds, but it’s not a growing number or people. We’ll move to some other tool and keep doing what we’ve always been doing. The “growth” is in people scanning Twitter, or using a tool like Flipboard, to simply try and locate the popular things that others are sharing. Those of us who simply like to write and share our thoughts and experiences are facing an even higher hill to climb to get folks to pay attention, because there simply aren’t enough people reading, let alone sharing, to help that larger mass of people find us.

As I said, this changes things. Do I need to go from blogging things I think are interesting, to writing posts designed to get shared more often? And what does that look like, exactly? I don’t know. At least not yet.

In the mean time, if you are interested in actually seeing everything I write here, grab the RSS feed and take a look at some RSS alternatives, or you can always go the old fashioned way, and subscribe to the email list.

Of course, if you aren’t following at all, you can also try the Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus pages as well.

Most of all, I want to say thank you for those of you who do subscribe, or follow in whatever way you currently do so, and for sharing the site among your own network. Obviously, when it comes to building up readership and community around this site, that goes a long, long way!

Yesterday’s announcement that Google is shutting down Reader was a little bit of a shock to me, personally. I use it daily. I rely on it to follow a couple of hundred blogs and websites all in one place. Over the years, Reader has been the go-to RSS reader for most users, all but eliminating any useful competitors. (Especially for those of us who line in the cloud using multiple devices.)

The reason given was declining usage. Some of the commentary about it says that much of that declining usage is due to Twitter, and tools based on the Twitter infrastructure, like Flipboard. Perhaps there’s something to that. Personally, I don’t think Twitter is a good RSS reader. It simply doesn’t have enough of a history to allow for me to not look at it all day and simply catch up in the evening. That’s what my RSS reader is for, and Google Reader allowed to do that catch up on any device I happened to have handy. Now, that’s going to be gone, and I don’t know that any alternative is going to help me accomplish the same thing.

The larger story though, is that the idea of using RSS has obviously fallen out of favor. People seem to be using Twitter, and Google obviously expects us to use Google Plus instead of a dedicated RSS reader. As a blogger, that does give me pause. It’s clear that people are no longer following every post from their favorite writers. They are waiting for their Twitter or Google Plus “community” to bubble up interesting posts. Even as I write this, it occurs to me that I don’t know how many people, if any, will even see this. There was a time when I could count on “x” number of people seeing this post in Google Reader. Now, I simply have to see who decides to share, retweet, like a post before I know if there will be much of an audience for it.

I think that changes things. I don’t know how, and I don’t really think I have understood this change as it has been taking place, but there’s no question that writing a blog post, and getting people to read it, has become more of a challenge. It’s no longer a matter of attracting subscribers, and trying to get those folks to share or comment on a post. Now, you have to get the smaller group of dedicated readers to use social media to spread the word for you. Without that, a post may just be the proverbial tree falling in the woods.

As I discussed last week, one of my challenges of using the Social Plugin to draw in comments and replies from Facebook and Twitter back to the original blog posts, is getting those comments imported to Disqus.

After a couple of failed attempts at this, I discovered one really good reason not to try and use something like a cron job to automate this. Turns out that if you use Askimet to blog spam; and since Disqus doesn’t really do much with trackbacks, you have to either disable trackbacks or leave Askimet running to block the spam trackbacks; this can create a problem. Any comments in your spam queue are part of your Disqus export, and cause an error on import. So in order to successfully export your new social comments from WordPress into Disqus, you have to empty the spam queue before running the export job.

It seems I have two options, manually clear the spam filter and then start the export function from within the Disqus plugin, or disable Askimet and disable trackbacks on all posts.

Come to think of it, do trackbacks really do much any more?

I’ve installed the Social plugin from Mailchimp on the blog, mostly because I’ve seen a few mentions of it recently and was curious to see it at work.

The idea of pulling in replies to a blog post that appear on Twitter and Facebook seems like something worth checking out. I’m not ready to ditch Disqus and switch back to just using Social with the WordPress comments again, I think Disqus offers a lot in terms of managing and interacting with comments that WordPress doesn’t at this point, but we’ll see how well the two systems play together. I already know that any comments pulled into WordPress from Facebook and/or Twitter will need to sync back up with Disqus, and that import job can take up to 24 hours, so I know the social comments won’t appear on the blog quickly, but I will be able to see them in WordPress and track just how many comments there are and then see how much of a pain it is to keep Disqus and WordPress in sync. So, you never know what the final result will be, but you know me, if there’s some new tool out there worth playing around with, I’ll be right there to see it for myself.

Anyone else using Social? What has your experience been?

So as I’ve been using Tumblr a bit as a fun little experiment, one of the things that struck me about the service is the lack of commenting. That seemed a bit odd to me. Sure I could always reblog a post and make my own little note about it, but sometimes I just wanted to make a comment, not create a new post on my blog.

Now I get that Tumblr is designed around the reblog, I’ve even had a couple of things reblogged, and reblogged a couple of things myself so it’s not completely foreign. It’s actually kind of a cool little feature, and super simple. But, I sort of missed just having comments.

Then today, I stumbled across a Tumblr blog that had comments. In fact, it had Disqus running, the same commenting plugin I use on WordPress. Sure enough, I went over to Disqus and registered the Tumblr blog over there, and getting comments using Disqus really couldn’t have been any easier.

So, strike down that first impression of Tumblr. I’m sure I’ll have more impressions as I continue along!

Today marked the first time I saw the Pages Feed that I first mentioned last week on the right hand-side of my Facebook Newsfeed page. As you know, I’ve been looking forward to see if this might be away to increase the reach of Facebook pages, although I seriously have my doubts, because I don’t think most people do more than look at their Newsfeed. I don’t think most people even realize that Facebook is filtering their newsfeed, nor do they realize that it doesn’t show the latest posts at the top by default. I don’t hold out much hope that making users look at a secondary feed for the Pages they like is going to be a magic bullet to increase a pages reach.

Still, they were putting it out there as a peace offering to page owners, so I wanted to see it for myself. A couple of things stand out to me after spending some time looking at it:

1. It is not sorted by recent posts on top. It is obviously using Facebook’s Top Stories algorithm, and there is no option to switch to showing the posts in “Most Recent First”.

2. I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled through close to 100 posts on my Pages Feed. I did not see a single solitary post that was delivered via RSS Graffiti or Networked Blogs. Obviously, the auto-posting of your own content is frowned upon within Facebook’s algorithm.  I suspected as much when I looked at the very low reach numbers for that sort of post on my own page, but this really confirmed for me that there’s almost no point in using these tools on Facebook. Your content isn’t reaching anyone that way.

3. I do, however, see many of the posts I’ve sent to Facebook via IFTTT. The algorithm seems to like things coming from there slightly more than using tools designed specifically to post to Facebook. Yeah, if I were the folks working on Networked Blogs or RSS Graffiti, I’d be pissed.

So, I’m thinking it’s time to disable RSS Graffiti, and try using IFTTT  for my own content instead of just things I save to Diigo, which is how I use it now. We’ll see how well that works, or if I have to resort to manually posting each new blog post to Facebook manually. If it comes down to that, I may just take a look at really not doing much with the Facebook page any longer, for the same reasons that Mark Cuban laid out this week.

I have written recently about the drastic drop in reach of Facebook pages as they are continually tweaking the algorithm that determines what shows up in users timeline. It seems like they may be making some changes, creating a Page Feed and allowing users to get notifications from pages.

As much as I appreciate Facebook trying to both provide value for Pages, and protect users newsfeed from being overrun by commercial posts, I don’t know how much this helps. Users would have to go even more out of their way to see content from pages they are choosing to follow. I suspect most Facebook users don’t even create lists and only see what shows up in their timeline. Heck, I wonder if most are even aware that their Newsfeed is being filtered for them. I think there may well be a few fans of my page that don’t even know they are missing posts everyday. Making these people take extra steps to fix a problem they aren’t even aware of isn’t going to help. I can hope that people will see the page feed and see more of my posts, but I’m not holding my breathe. I still don’t think FB should be filtering my newsfeed for me. I’ve me tools to do it myself, and get out of the way.

It’s not quite dead yet, but it certainly is on the deathwatch. Given that fact, while I’m not quite pulling the plug on using Feedburner for the RSS feed from this site, or the email subscription to the site, I have switched the sidebar on the blog to use the original WordPress RSS feeds and the built-in WordPress Jetpack email subscription instead of the Feedburner ones. So new subscribers to the feed or the email list, will now be using those services instead of Feedburner, and I’ll be prepared ahead of time for what seems to be the inevitable shuttering of the service.

If you’re a current subscriber to either the Feedburner RSS or Feedburner email list, you may want to update those subscriptions as well. You know, just in case.

You’ll find links to do that on the sidebar, as well as links to follow on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus as well, if you’d rather do that.