Was alerted to a listing in MSNBC's Weblog Central blog. Is it just me or is the layout of that page funny? I see three sidebars down the right side of my browser window before you get to the weblog. Could be a Mac thing?
Joan, the executive producer writing the blog,Will Femia is off to a great start, doing what she calls "blogspotting."
(Thanks to blogger and MSNBC employee Gael for the correction.)
categories: metablog
7:42:00 PM 
say what []
Per dive into mark, I just added a link tag indicating this blog's rss feed. The code I added should work for any Radio blog whose RSS feed is named rss.xml:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss xml" title="RSS" href="<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>rss.xml">categories: metablog radioactive
11:38:09 AM say what []
Yesterday, our own Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl" Breslin passed Pornographer's Picks in Salon Blogs' all-time ranking. The anonymous raincoater had a large head start and still brings in remarkable numbers on the strength of his first month of postings, despite shooting blanks since August.
Plan B's return from vacation and a who-shot-JR style cliffhanger will likely now thwart my tortoise-and-the-hare strategy for sneaking into second place, though it will not be long before Reverse Cowgirl assumes her rightful place on top of both of us.
10:11:33 AM say what []
At the Berkeley J-school weblog panel* an audience member asked if most blogs used email to send reminders or even as an alternative mode for reading. A discussion ensued about how common, desirable, or easy this might be.
My personal view is that I'd like to make anything I publish for free online available in as many modes as possible. Yes, it's ideal when I can track and see the readership, but I suspect that additional formats (RSS, email) tend to add incremental net readers more than they tend to cannibalize an existing readership.
So this morning I dropped by bloglet.com, signed up for a free account and have set about adding an email subscription feature to my masthead sidebar, which I'm planning to insert right after the XML badges.
Bloglet also handles RSS feeds and I'll probably experiment with that method as well (I'll have to inpute RFB's feed as a second blog to do so, I believe) to see how they differ.
What's interesting is that Bloglet accommodates several different philosophies of email use by offering three choices for each blog. You can send out just reminders with links back to your blog (I assume titles/headlines are included, but I'll have to check that), you can specify a cutoff number of characters to send as an excerpt of each entry, or you can send out full entries.
You have to choose just one of these "what to send out" choices for any submitted blog. That is, you can't offer these multiple choices (not easily, not without setting up a new blog entry at bloglet for each choice and then hacking together the forms with a radio button, I suppose), but what do you want for free?
There also don't seem to be as many scheduling options as you'd have with, say, an e-mail mailing's digestifier (such as periods beyond daily, such as weekly, or mailout triggers based on number of posts, such as every 10), although I imagine you could always subscribe an e-mail address to your blog and then use all the usual list toggles to carve the outflow.
For now I've set up the subscription to send out 60 word excerpts of each day's posts, but I'll probably keep experimenting with the service to see what I can squeeze out of it.
Radio users can ignore the id number and login information requested when registering a blog. These fields are there for accessing blogs via the Blogger API.
Yes, all of these priorities are somewhat suspended as a commercial/work/money-related deadline hangs over me. No, I can't talk about that project yet. Yes, I will as soon as I can.
categories: metablog
10:02:06 AM say what []
