Dave Cullen did some superb reporting for Salon on Columbine, and he’s now started his own Salon Blog, “The Fact of the Matter Is.”

We’ve moved blogs.salon.com onto a different box and are hoping that the result is better performance.

On Day One of Salon blogs, looks like about 75 people jumped in. Thanks to all. Some interesting stuff:

Chris Malcolm is tracking bizarre news stories, like “Amoebas attack boy’s brain.”

CJ asks how people become cynical.

Pru’s Psychic Spy Training Facility. Yow! Lessons in “Remote Viewing.” I’m not a cynic but I’m very much a skeptic.

An Innocent Abroad. William Thompson’s tales of life on the road — Sicily and beyond.

Rogers Cadenhead is making sure that expelled congressman James Traficant’s Web page does not vanish from the Net.

By popular demand (well, all right, JD Lasica and a couple of other readers asked) I’ve removed the lines from this page’s style sheet that dictate the body type size. So now the posts should appear, the way Salon’s articles do, at whatever font size you’ve set in your browser.

Andrew Bayer is dreaming of China and blogging away in memoriam of Red Sox announcer Ned Martin and Leo McKern.

James Scheinblum and others are raising the perfectly good question: Shouldn’t Salon Premium subscribers get a discount on their annual blog fee?

Short answer is, we want to do something like this and are considering it. But both Salon Premium ($30 a year) and Salon blogs ($39.95 a year for hosting and software updates) are annual services that have been priced at the low end to cover costs and provide modest profit margins for the companies involved (Salon for Salon Premium, Salon and UserLand for Salon blogs). We think both services are reasonable deals. We’d still like to show our Premium subscribers some thanks, though. But we have one whole set of software pieces sitting at www.salon.com that manages Premium subscriptions, and another at blogs.salon.com that plugs into UserLand, and its storefront for software sales. We could have spent weeks or months trying to tie these together before launching this project. Instead, we wanted to get the doors open now.

Rogers Cadenhead has started a category (sub grouping of posts by topic) on his blog offering technical support and tips for Salon Bloggers.

Dave Winer’s Davenet post on the Salon Blogs/UserLand deal. Press release here.

Over at Second p0st the mystery user (actually it seems to be developer Phillip Pearson — welcome!) who found our server back when we were in test mode is keeping close watch as the new blogs get started.

There are lots of ways you can publish a blog. But it isn’t always so easy to get yourself noticed. By starting your blog with Salon, you’ll automatically be part of a community of Salon-based bloggers, which will help you get the word out and bring visitors to read what you write. Your blog will be listed on the Salon blogs recent updates and rankings by page-views pages. And I’ll be following the new blogs as they come online here, providing links and pointers to the most interesting bloggers and posts.

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!