UserLand Software, Salon’s business partner in the Salon Blogs program, has been in disarray for much of this year, so it’s great news that the company is announcing a new management team today.

It’ll take a little time to figure out our next steps. In the meantime, welcome to the new gang.

Radio Free Blogistan is now a group blog focusing on metablogging discussions (discussions about blogging itself), featuring contributions not only from its founder Christian Crumlish but also from several other people, including Rayne, Andrew Bayer, Christopher Filkins and Liza Sabater.

Dave Pollard has a fascinating survey of Salon Blogs statistics.

For those of you who have been wondering about some of the technical problems we’ve had here in recent months, on and off (most recently, thankfully, off), we’ve sort of been in a holding pattern. Our partners at UserLand, who actually run the Salon Blogs servers and produce and support the software we use, have been in a management transition. Dave Winer, the company’s founder, has posted recently that UserLand should be announcing a new management team soon. When it does, I hope to be able to report to the Salon blog community with more information about what we can do to improve whatever chronic problems may remain.

Salon Blogs server has obviously been having some serious problems over the past 24 hours. I’ve been traveling and unable to monitor the situation but we appear to be back up. More as I learn more.

“Filchyboy” has just concluded a kind of performance art on the rcs.salon.com server, sending its “updates” page a series of URLs and linkwords that form a poem. Each line links to a page on his server.

If you find this interesting, check it out now — this is like Zen sand art, it’ll disappear as other people update their blogs and send the poem down the page… The poem doesn’t do that much for me, but it’s a neat little trick, and I have always admired the Brian Eno approach of using technology in ways that were not intended or imagined by its inventors.

Real Live Preacher has long been one of my favorite Salon blogs. It remains anonymous — I don’t know the writer’s real name — but now I know what his voice sounds like, because Chris Lydon (the great Public Radio interviewer who is now plunging into the blogosphere) has interviewed him. Here. Definitely worth turning the “mute” off and the volume up. (Lydon previously interviewed Julie Powell, too, here.)

Congratulations to Julie Powell for the lengthy and well-deserved profile in today’s New York Times. For the record, I should note that I said a lot of nice things about the Julie/Julia project to the Times writer, Amanda Hesser, that did not make it into her piece, which sensibly focused on Ms. Powell, Ms. Child and the food.

And that, contrary to what the Times article says, “Salon’s blog editor” is not now nor has it ever been my title. These blogs don’t have editors, as most of you know! That’s sort of the point…