Play Blogpoly

Based on a blogging-themed version of the Monopoly board from littleoslo, gaming site Kurnik just launched Blogpoly. From their post about the launch:

For a geek like me, there was no better theme for a Monopoly-like game that I planned to add (even Ghettopoly couldn't compare).

Before you give it a try, however, please be warned that the game is highly addictive. Seriously. The Polish flavour of Blogpoly launched a few days ago is now attracting crowds of more than 3,000 simultaneous players, nearly as much as the most popular game on Kurnik (a Polish card game of Thousand).

I’m happy with where Blogger is, especially since we’re sharing the color with some cool people. Though, while the yellows can be pretty good, when I play I favor the oranges if I can get them. Nothing like catching someone right out of jail with a big ol’ hotel.

[via Joystiq]

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Additional options for Backlinks

Previously, we tied the post-level setting for Backlinks to the Comments setting. Turns out that proved a little limiting for some folks. So we've just pushed additional options that will enable you to control your Backlinks settings separately.

These options can be found in the collapsable section we just added to the bottom of the post composition window. (Yay! I don't need to see the "change date" options all the time anymore.)

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An Argument for Cat Photos

Marc Hedlund, blogging at O'Reilly Radar, makes a case for adding perhaps-inconsequential tidbits about yourself to your blog as a way to give your readers a better sense of who you are and therefore make you more memorable to them. He writes:

It turns out, then, for me at least, that reading about someone's cat and what they ate for breakfast and seeing their Flickr photos of the swirls in their coffee and all that adds up to a picture of a person in my mind; not a full likeness, but enough for an actual presence in memory; and with that picture, I associate the things they tell me with them, and remember what they say surprisingly well. Far better than my memory usually works, unattended.

That's the only excuse I need!

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Sausage bloggin'

Hot Dog Spot "is the weblog of a crack team of 'dogophiles' who are hot on the trail of the best dog in Los Angeles!"

Godspeed, dogophiles. I wish someone would do this for San Francisco. My vote is for Rosamunde Sausage in lower Haight.

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EFF Guide to Student Blogging

In addition to their Legal Guide, the EFF has published a Guide to Student Blogging; here's a snippet:

Do I Have More Protections for a Personal Blog?

Yes. In Emmett v. Kent School District, 92 F. Supp.2d 1088 (W.D. Wash. 2000), the court held that public school officials had violated a student's First Amendment rights by punishing the student for his personal website, the "Unofficial Kentlake High Home Page." The court held that "[a]lthough the intended audience was undoubtedly connected to Kentlake High School, the speech was entirely outside of the school's supervision or control." Likewise, in Flaherty v. Keystone Oaks School Dist., 247 F.Supp.2d 698 (W.D. Pa. 2003) a federal court found a public school's policy, which prohibited "inappropriate, harassing, offensive or abusive" behavior, was unconstitutional because "the policy could be (and is) read by school officials to cover speech that occurs off school premises and that is not related to any school activity in an arbitrary manner."

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Blogger Outage Indicator

Every once in a great while (and much less now than in the past), we have to take Blogger down and poke at it for a bit. Blogger Status is the most comprehensive place for outage alerts, but who wants to have to check another blog? Now we have a new way to let you know of upcoming outages: the Blogger status indicator. It’ll show up on your Dashboard and on pages under the Posting tab and warn of any scheduled outages that might disrupt your posting.


This indicator checks in with Blogger every minute to see if there’s an outage coming up. This means that, even if you’re working on a long post and haven’t refreshed the page in a while, you’ll get notification just the same.

As an added bonus, if the indicator can’t get in touch with Blogger, either because we’re down or because you’re not connected to the Internet, it’ll warn you that you probably won’t be able to post.


Despite all this, if by some trick of fate you lose a post — to a Blogger outage, to network trouble, or to a browser crash — you can usually recover it by using your browser’s back button or the recover post link on the posting page.

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Ageless

Carla Johnson for AP on rise of blogging by senior citizens:

Joe Jenett, a Detroit-area Web designer who has been tracking the age of bloggers for a personal project called the Ageless Project, said he has noticed more older bloggers in the past two years.

"Isn't that phenomenal? And their writing is vibrant," Jenett said. He noted that sites such as Blogger.com give step-by-step instructions and free hosting, making it simpler to self-publish on the Web.

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