Since I started using Google Reader I play with it quite a lot on a daily basis. Besides the obvious minor bugs I have discovered, you can also do all kinds of things with it, e.g. spy on people. Recently, while subscribing to more blogs, I have noticed the following:
This is what you normally post on your blog when you want to verify with Technorati that it belongs to you, in case somebody is not aware of it. Wow, so Eric Ward only verified his blog last December? But he started it almost a year ago, judging by the archives! Of course, once he got it verified he removed the “test” post – but the tricky thing about blog feeds is even if you remove a post it can still stay in the feed. OK theoretically I do not need Google Reader to discover such things – but if it’s your feed reader of choice that’s how you do it 🙂
With Google Reader, you can also identify where Google’s right hand does not know what its left hand is doing. As to what Google reader cannot do: it cannot identify feeds on blogs that either have feeds operated by Feedburner (e.g. evilgreenmonkey – btw Rob you still have the old onsite feed listed in your meta), or do not have the feed URL indicated in the blog’s meta tags (e.g. Eric Ward). WTF though, really? isn’t Feedburner owned by Google and isn’t Blogger which is Eric’s blogging platform owned by Google as well? And don’t you index all those blogs anyway as they ping you as they add posts? Come on Google guys, you are accumulating all this data for nothing while pushing all your behavioral ads on us?
Now, what would have been really interesting is if, along with launching comment sharing in the Reader, they let people watch what others are sharing and saying about their own blogs – with a blog ownership verification akin to Technorati’s or Google Webmaster Tools. A reputation management function of sorts – not like it is that difficult to do either. Come on, Google?