Google Adds Social Bookmarking and Blog Recommendation Engine

Writing by Social Marketing Journal on Monday, August 18, 2008 Comments (5)

Google adds a friends list, social bookmarking, RSS feed item sharing, comments
on blog posts and a blog recommendation engine based on your friends list

In Google Reader, you can create your Google profile; you can now add a Google
Reader shared items friends list, add individual pages or posts to Google Reader
shared items and get this Google Reader now has a blog Recommendation Engine.

- You can create a list of friends from Gmail contacts.

- You can mass email your friends.

- Share your Google Reader individual blog posts.

- You can ask them to add Google Reader to their Google account links.

- When you share a new Google Reader item and you can mass email your friends and
direct them to it.

- You can add individual pages to Google Reader with their bookmarklet. Sound
familiar? This is social bookmarking.

- Google will be able to rank your profile by your interests, your friends interests
and your reading habits.

- To add friends to Google Reader, click the link “Sharing settings” under shared items.

There you will be able to view your own profile or create one, add friends from your
Gmail address book and invite friends using their email address although I did not
add any friends that did not have a Gmail address.

But what the heck is Google doing with this?

First off, we know that Google does use data from Google Reader to learn things
about our blogs. Like how many times we publish on a weekly basis, how many
subscribers we have and how many times we add subscribers versus how many visitors
we have.

So, if Google is judging your blog by how many RSS subscribers you have, then
wouldn’t it be next up to judge the posts by how many and which ones are being
shared in Google reader?

Then, wouldn’t it make sense that how many friends you have and how many friends
they have and what their overall interests are would affect those posts ranking?s in
Google search?

Google does not even have to employ voting in Google search, because since it is on
their servers, they can tell how many are reading your feed, which feeds items they
shared and more importantly how many are actually read.

Google Blog Recommendation Engine

From Google Reader:

“Recommendations for new feeds are generated by comparing your interests with
the feeds of users similar to you.”

“Your recommendations list is automatically generated. It takes into account the
feeds you?re already subscribed to, as well as information from your Web
History, including your location. Aggregated across many users, this information
can indicate which feeds are popular among people with similar interests. For
instance, if a lot of people subscribe to feeds about both peanut butter and
jelly, and you only subscribe to feeds about peanut butter, Reader will
recommend that you try some jelly. This process is completely automated and
anonymous; your personal information will be protected in accordance with our
privacy policy.”

With these additions Google has quietly rolled out their own Google Social
Bookmarking site all easily accessed from Google Reader.

You can learn more about the Google
Social Bookmarking and Blog Recommendation Engine here.

Comments (5)                      Category: Social Bookmarking                      

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