Hello my lovelies!!! It's winter and the holidays are upon us!!  A lot has changed for me in the last several months and now I'm back in full force in the blogosphere (I missed you all dearly).  What a way to celebrate a return and the start of the winter season!  I was asked by one of my friends Angel (check out her blog Sew Crafty Angel) if/when my ads would be going back on sale because I had stopped selling ads when I was inactive, and I thought this would be the perfect time to start selling ads again!  The ad prices have gone down from before and there are more spaces available.  The 25% off applies to all ads on my blog.  For more information and to purchase an ad on What Jean Likes you can click the following link or the coupon above to go directly to my ad page. Sponsor/Advertising .  Use the code: MERRY25 at check out to get the 25% off discount!

I hope you all have a lovely Thursday!

Xo,

Jean

image not my own

I'm so stinkin' excited right now because I was browsing around Bloglovin' following back all you lovelies who followed me, thank you.. and I came across this page where it shows the Up and Coming blogs... and mine was #1 in Photography!!  So stoked.  I know I'm far off from #1 in the Top Blogs category and will probably never get there, but it's pretty exciting to see my blog as #1 in the Up and Comings!!

Thank you all for getting me there.. Hey, are you following me on Bloglovin'? I am still learning and navigating Bloglovin' and it's not bad (even though I refuse to give up on Google Friend Connect).  Thank goodness for email notifications about people following me because those help me to follow everyone back.  I don't care for the way Bloglovin' makes it hard to follow people back unless you keep track of all the people following you via email.

Anywhoo... come on over and check out Bloglovin' if you haven't yet!!  I promise, I will follow you if you follow me! *wink wink* .  Here's my page: What Jean Likes on Bloglovin' 

Leave a comment with your Bloglovin' url so I can follow back!! Let's share some Bloglovin' lovin' shall we?

Aloha and thank you all so much for making my day,

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

So I don't know if you all heard yet, but Google Reader will not be available after July 1, 2013.  They claim the reason for that is due to the decrease in usage and readership of Google Reader but let's be honest, it's more about Google Plus being a fail than a fall in Google Reader usage. (For the full story, click the "read more" button).

One has to wonder, if they're cancelling Google Reader, will they also cancel the Google Friend Connect (GFC) feature?  More than likely they will which is such a disappointment for myself and bloggers like me who've worked so hard to get our GFC follow numbers to grow.  A little over a year ago, GFC stopped being available for non-Blogger (Google Hosted Blogs) to use and I'm pretty sure that in the near future, no one will be able to use GFC.  Is it the easiest service to follow back and use?  Yes and no.  GFC is convenient because you can click "follow" and a pop up window opens and you follow the blog. Done.  However, following back people that follow you is increasingly difficult because even if you click on the little pictures from your followers, not all of them link to their blogs so it's a challenge to follow everyone back.

I think Google is planning on obliterating all of their external services in an attempt to get more people to use their Google Plus feature.  Yuck.  I don't know about you, but I'm no fan of Google Plus.  The circles are confusing, I still am not quite sure how to follow people from my blog page and not my personal account, and only a selected few pages are able to have a custom url (plus.google.com/blogname).  Most of us are stuck with some random long number.  Not a very professional way to market your blog.  If Google was smart, they'd find a way to integrate their GFC feature with Google Plus or transfer the follows on GFC to our Google Plus pages automatically.  Let me tell you, if they did that, I'd be much happier and would actually use Google Plus for once...

It's not that Google is the only social media outlet with challenges.  Facebook and it's ever changing news feed, privacy policies and lack of integration between personal accounts and pages leaves a lot to be desired.  I am constantly irritated with Facebook. Firstly, why doesn't "liking" a page while you're "acting as" your business/blog page count as a like?  Mark Zuckerberg is wealthy and smart enough to figure out a way to integrate the "likes" you make on your personal account with the "likes" you make from your page.  It's such a hassle to go back and forth from your personal account to your page when you're "liking" someone, just so the "like" counts.

Another gripe I have with Facebook pages specifically is the fact that the news feed never seems to be quite up to date.  You can sort it by "most popular" and by "most recent" but the most recent sometimes only has posts made several hours ago and not the most recent post that the page you "liked" actually put up.  Frustrating!

Now Facebook also makes it super hard to get your posts seen from your "page" unless you pay to promote it and even then, it doesn't feel like you're getting many views. I wonder if the numbers they give saying how many people viewed the post are made up because if 5,000 people actually saw the post I paid $20 to promote, shouldn't I have more than 1 like? Ya know? I could go on and on about Facebook but I already made a post about my Gripes with Facebook before.

So what are we bloggers to do? Well the people I know who are on non-Google Blogger hosted blogs are already prepared for this transition because they've had to network using other social media outlets for at least a year now.  It's still not clear if GFC will be cancelled but it's probably around 80% or more likely that it will be so we have to prepare just in case.  Am I going to quit using GFC? Heck no!  I'm going to ride that horse 'till the bitter end. In the meantime, however, I'm going to start actually working on my other social media outlets that I've neglected like Bloglovin' and.... I cringe as I type this... Google Plus.

So, please follow me on both sites, I'll provide the links below.  Comment and tell me your thoughts and put links for your Bloglovin' and Google Plus as well so I can follow you back!!  I'm going to have a super hard time adjusting to not seeing all my favorite blogs in Google Reader so I have to start finding new ways to follow you all!! I follow everyone back who comments so please leave a comment so I won't miss your blog come July!

• What Jean Likes on Bloglovin'
• What Jean Likes on Google Plus

Here's the story courtesy of CNN:

"[T]he Twitter TOS (terms of service) provides that users retain their rights to the content they post -- with the exception of the license granted to Twitter and its partners -- rebutting AFP's claim that Twitter intended to confer a license on it to sell Morel's photographs."