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?

So for the last couple of days I’ve had to do some Google Local listings for clients and I noticed that Google has perhaps reverted back to it’s old phone verification process.  For some time now you were given the option to have Google call you immediately or in 5 minutes.  However, upon clicking finish when adding or updating a list and selecting phone verificationI have since been receiving the following screen:

Seems that Google has gotten a bit impatient with the whole phone verification process, which sucks for those of us who need to follow up with the client first.  The good news is that you can still go back in and request the call again later, but I’m pretty sure one of my clients has gotten two random calls in the last couple of days wondering why the hell they are getting an automated PIN via phone.  Shame, shame Google!

UPDATE: Upon doing some more work with the listings it now appears that Google has changed the phone verification process completely.  In the past you would get a PIN and enter it when they called you.  Now, instead, they call you with the PIN and you have to input it online.  Talk about a pain when it comes to setting these up for clients!