The other day I was thinking about some blog posts to write and I inevitably came to the conclusion that I often reference people in my blog posts.  Sometimes those references happen to be to specific blog posts, in which case I link to the specific blog post in question.  Most times howerver I am interested in just mentioning a person.

For example if I head from @cdetorres that LoudCloud LMS is insanely expensive, and I wanted to mention that in a blog post, @cdetorres is obviously a Twitter handle, but  when you are reading this post @cdetorres is not underlined and it does not take you to his twitter stream.  If I wanted to make mention to someone I share information with on Google+, on Google+ I would add a plus sign and then add that person's name (+Apostolos Koutropoulos would be mine for example).  Facebook has similar functionality for mentions.

Back a number of years ago, when I was experimenting with various blogging platforms I was experimenting with LiveJournal. LiveJournal had (and probably still does) have a way of connecting people you mention in your blog posts to their LiveJournal profiles - of course the caveat is that the mentioned people have to have a LiveJournal account.  This is a great feature, but I don't use LiveJournal, and most people I know don't.  So how about a Blogger People Connect? If you have a Google+ account you can automatically link to people by putting  +TheirName, but if you don't (or want to use additional services) you can tell Blogger your Facebook and Twitter handles and anytime you start to type something that looks like an @username Blogger can recommend people to link to - no fuss.