Love him or hate him, Michael Jackson was a pop culture icon. Surrounded in mystery, money, and misunderstanding the pop singer who died mysteriously on June 25th of this year, is now being honored by the folks at Google to commemorate the singers birthday. Google users are already being greeted with the following Google logo to commemorate what would have been the singer’s 51st birthday on August 29th.

Sadly both the singers birthday and the logo come just one day after the coroner released the findings on Michael Jackson’s death, which has been ruled a homicide.

One of my favorite Google properties is Reader. I use it daily and if I could keep up with it would add hundreds of thousands of blogs and websites to the feed just because it makes my life that much easier. But with the recent social changes being rolled out to Google Reader I got to thinking about how Google could take some of that social power and put the data back in the hands of bloggers.

What if Google could combine the forces of Feedburner, their RSS feed-management service, and Google Reader to provide bloggers with additional information about not only how many people are subscribed to their feeds, but also commenting and sharing items from their feed?

Buzz monitoring is a huge part of social media, and while most people are mainly focused on social networking sites, Google Reader is slowly becoming a social community of blog readers who share, comment about, and “Like” various blog posts. As a blogger I would love to have that sort of data at my fingertips.

Imagine being able to track the comments made in Google Reader about your post, or the ability to view the number of “Likes” a post received, and more importantly the number of times it was shared. It would be one more way for bloggers to track the buzz surrounding a certain article or topic. Furthermore it opens the door for even more reader engagement.

There are a number of blogs I read in Google Reader that I rarely actually visit. So many blogs post their full articles in their RSS feed that I don’t really have to visit their site to read them. Because of this I am much less engaged with the writer and in many cases the blogger probably has no idea I’m a regular reader. If Google could integrate Google Reader and Feedburner, bloggers would see my comments about their posts and be able to engage me the same way they would if I had commented directly on their blog, giving bloggers another opportunity to reach out to their audience.

There is an amazing opportunity here for Google to take one of its stronger properties, Google Reader and use it to revive one of its weaker properties, Feedburner and create an amazing tool for bloggers. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Are there any social aspects of Google Reader that you would like to be able to see as a blogger?

There used to be a time when I had a safe haven on the net free of spammers.  My perfect little Zen garden full of information shared by those I trusted most, but today that place of Zen was tainted by the spammer world. This place of enlightenment was Google Reader.  Before the social overhaul Google Reader was a place where my friends and my fellow search geeks could share interesting reads, and even if it wasn’t something I cared to read it was never blatant spam.

I have been away from the web the last few days due to a back injury and feeling a bit under the weather and when I returned this morning and opened my reader I was greeted with a little yellow note that read, “1 new person sharing with you”.  Intrigued I clicked on the link hoping that another of my SEO Dojo or Twitter buddies had decided to share their feeds with me, but alas I was disappointed to find nothing more than the following:

If you can’t read it, the only shared item that Mr. Randy Powelson is sharing says, “Trying to help people make money so maybe I could make money as well”  Conveniently enough it doesn’t even link to anything.  Tonight I did some further digging on Mr. Powelson’s Google profile.  His blog of course, hosted on blogger, has 2 entries “How To Make Money Online” and “How To Get Traffic To Your Site” and it’s of course covered in AdSense ads and affiliate links.  The other website listed was a spam-tastic sports news site with no content of value whatsoever.

In a world where I once felt protected from these shenanigans, I see that I will now most likely be deleting Google Reader share requests about as often as I now delete Twitter follow requests.  I understand that when it comes to the internet and spam, that is just the nature of the beast.  But I wish that the social sites and the social features we use on some of our favorite sites would become more spam proof.  If you look at how far we’ve come in terms of stopping e-mail spam, it makes you wonder what steps the social community is going to take to stomp out bogus profiles and bots.

Don’t get me wrong I love the social aspect of pretty much every service I use, especially Google Reader, but since I limit myself to about an hour each morning to go through my feeds, I really don’t want to have to start going through bogus share requests also.

Have you experienced this new form of social spam in your Google Reader account?  If so, how long has it been happening and how frequently are you seeing it?