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?