What is the Difference Between Google's “following” a Blog vs Subscribe?

By Xah Lee. Date: 2010-09-23. Last updated: 2012-01-27.

If you are using Google's services, you can “follow” a blog published on google's blogger. When you follow, that means, if the blog has a “follow widget”, you will show up there. (similar to Twitter's “followers”.) Follow also means that you are automatically subscribed to the blog, from your Google Reader .

Here's Google Help on the topic: http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=106241 .

Not that the “follow” is exclusively a Google thing. Blogs not hosted by Google doesn't have that concept. Google Reader also lets you “like” any particular blog article. “Like” is something like a “up vote” in many websites. Author can also see how many times a particular article has been “liked”, if they are using Google's service.