I do most of my reading through Google Reader, and when I get an idea for the blog I post it to Google Buzz. The small number of followers I have there will sometimes comment and/or vote for ideas that pop up there. When its time to write something for the blog, I go back there for ideas.

Buzz will soon be retired by Google and Reader is going to be crippled. That’s going to affect me. For one thing, I won’t have access to Google Reader feeds from many of my favorite curators, most notably Courtney Conklin Knapp, the soy sauce of the internet. And I need a new place to pre-test my ideas. (I used to think that I would use Twitter for that, but my Twitter identity has become overrun with tweets like “I went back in time so I could be the first person to write about the paradoxes of time travel.”)

Google says that the retired services are to be replaced by Google+ so I am switching to Google+. In fact I have been using it for a while now, jotting down some ideas and getting feedback before posting them here. Google+ is more of a “social” social network than Buzz so instead of just dumping links and incomprehensible notes-to-self, I am writing little rough drafts. It works well. Writing doesn’t come easy for me but for some reason when I know that what I am writing is verifiably a rough draft, I loosen up a bit and it comes easier. The feedback is great too.

(One potential downside is that I write something wrong, people on G+ point out that its wrong and I am too embarrassed to post it here. You learn a lot from wrong ideas so that would be a loss.)

So if you are on G+ I hope to see you there, and I would be happy to get your feedback.

By the way, know any good blogs? It seems like a large number that I subscribe to on Reader have gone dark so I am looking for some new ones. “What’s Hot” in Google Reader is already gone!

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