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]

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.)

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!

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.

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."

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.

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.

As a consequence of adding the PuppetVision blog to Blogs of Note, I contributed to overwhelming the quota for their image hosting. Sorry ’bout that. I don’t know if it’s helpful or extortion to mention Blogger images as a way to post images without worrying about being BlogsOfNoteDotted. (Yeah, you heard me. I coined a phrase.)

So check out PuppetVision, but be nice to their servers and close your eyes. And now’s as good a time as any to give credit and admit that I crib my Blogs of Note nominations from Luxo, a blog about Pixar.

We've just introduced a frequently-asked for feature, comment moderation. By using this feature, you can approve or reject what would-be commenters are looking to post before it goes live on your blog.

This is useful in situations where you're looking for a bit more control over the conversation hosted on your blog. Additionally, comment moderation will prevent unwanted comment spam if previous deterrants like word verification and rel="nofollow" have proven insufficient.

You can choose to moderate your comments via either email or from blogger.com. To enable the feature go to the Settings | Comment tab of your blog. As always, more information on how to use this feature can be in the help.

A couple days ago, I picked up David Marusek's novel, Counting Heads, based on Cory Doctorow's ecstatic review over on BoingBoing.

Last night I finished it, after a week of franticly reading it in every spare second - unable to stop because on each page it seemed there was a new thumbnail of an idea or invention that would tease me along to the next chapter. Counting Heads has that remarkable quality of great science fiction - totally absorbing the reader in the intracies of complete world.

Just now I went to see what Blog Search would tell me about what others were saying about Counting Heads. And I realized that Dave Marusek has a Blog*Spot blog he started to talk about the release of his book.

Sweet!

(Interestingly, whenever authors start blogs people from both the publishing industry and bloggers themselves are, generally, excited. There's none of the "how do these two media relate to one another" angst that's been the central conversation around blogs and journalism for lo, these many years. Hmmm.)

It's November, and it's novel-writing time! If you haven't signed up already, you can do so at NaNoWriMo.org, or just dive in and start writing. In a few short weeks, you could have your very own shiny new novel. (Hint: Blog your writing as you go, to create a month-long serialized novel for all your friends. It's fun, and it's harder to quit if you have readers waiting for the next installment.) Good luck!