With the arrival of a new year I’ve decided the time was appropriate to make some aesthetic and functional changes to this blog. My tinkerings in this area are ongoing as we speak, but most of the main changes have already taken place.With this in mind I’ve prepared a screencast overview (embedded above) of several changes I made last night, including a theme change, email subscriptions, changes to commenting, status of Seesmic video commenting, and a roll-out of Google Friend Connect. Google Friend Connect in particularly is an aspect I’d like to explore more indepth in the coming months. According to Google, “…Friend Connect means more people engaging more deeply with your website — and with each other.”The idea is to enable readers to make themselves more conspicuously known to one another and provide means of establishing and developing relationships between one another. You have the opportunity to join the site using an existing Google, Yahoo!, AIM, or OpenID account. These accounts enable you to share information about yourself and your online spaces and sites with other users.My hope is that this will help nurture and grow a network amongst the readers of this blog to the point where the TechTicker acts as a portal or node for our activities, but is not a largely one-directional information source. If knowledge is indeed distributed, and the quality of a network directly related to the depth and diversity of its connections and nodes, then maximising the scope and scale of each individual’s representation within the network benefits all parties involved.For more information on Google Friend Connect please see the following video, or visit the information site.Any questions, feedback or comments please let me know!