Your blog lives and breathes. Today we’re launching a new way for you to check its pulse. It’s called Notifications, and it lives in the right corner of your Toolbar (Admin Bar), which appears at the top of your screen while you’re logged in to WordPress.com.

Whenever another WordPress.com user follows your blog, or likes one of your posts, Notifications will tell you who your newest fans are by adding a new note to the stack:

You can even follow them back, right from within the note.  After all, blogging is a journey of discovery and community.

If you’re a fan of Google+, as we are, a lot of this will be familiar as many parts were inspired by Google’s toolbar, and a bit by Facebook’s new real-time stream.

What will Notifications do in the future?

We’ll add more activities, such as comments.  We’ll give you a way to go back and see all of your notes in one place (right now, we show the 9 most recent activities).  We’ve got a bunch of exciting plans for new notifications and we can’t wait to share them with you.  And for those of you who are so popular that you get new followers and likes every few minutes, we’re already thinking about ways to help you manage and limit the flow activity.

We hope you enjoy checking the pulse of your blog with this new feature.  If you aren’t seeing the Notifications counter in your Toolbar, don’t worry: it will show up when your next follower or liker arrives.

For more information about followers and likes: My Followers, Likes.