Cal,

Down the left hand side you’ll see all the circles you’ve created, on clicking the button on each circle, you can choose to 'include activity in my stream'.
OR
You can get the “Plus Minus” extension for Google Chrome and take control of your Google Plus stream. It lets you select which Circles show up in your Google+ Stream and a lot more cool things.

With Google recent updates, its safer to build links with varied anchor texts rather than with same set or variations of the keyword. Also when you build link with "Jon Barnes", you actually increase the number of links to the site, but are diminishing the percentage of links with the anchor text "Silver Mercedes in Brooklyn” (and variants of that). Depending on how competitive the industry you in, I will say avoid building it with completely unrelated keyphrase. However it should not effect the rankings too much for Silver Mercedes in Brooklyn” (and variants of that).

Thanks,

Navneet Kaushal: CEO,Page Traffic |India's No. 1 SEO & Link Company
Contact |navneet@pagetraffic.com- 800-718-7603 x 222 | Skype - pagetraffic