Beginning

Welcome to this experiment! Salon, in partner with UserLand Software, is offering a new service to its users: Publish your own blog. Using UserLand’s Radio software it takes all of five minutes or so to get online. Really. The first 30 days are free, so you can download the software, start using it and see if you like it. After that it’s $39.95 for the software and one year’s hosting and software updates.

Thanks

A project like this takes a lot of help from a lot of people. Here at Salon, Jennifer Ormerod designed the lovely image you see at the top of this page; and Benjamin Grant, Doug Herr and the rest of our IT team put the technical wheels in motion on our end (with Jill Rosenthal helping out on the HTML tables end of things). David Talbot and Michael O’Donnell both supported the idea from the start. UserLand’s president John Robb made the working partnership happen, along with Jake Savin and Lawrence Lee.

Mostly, though, I should thank Dave Winer. He’s combined two careers for the last decade (at least) — writer and software developer — and I think his dual experience is what makes his software so innovative (and easy to use). I’ve been reading Dave’s work since around 1994, and he has always made me think in new ways about everything he writes about.

One reason I’m glad Salon and UserLand are working together is that, from what I can see, both are independent companies, survivors in fields dominated by unresponsive giants, and both are driven foremost by passion — on Salon’s part, for good online journalism, and on UserLand’s part, for great software.

So blogs away!