Lee Felsenstein is blogging at Lee Felsenstein Ad Seriatim.
Subtitle: “Thoughts of an Industry Character who’s been around since Year
Minus One.” Lee was a pioneer of the dawn of the personal-computer era; I
learned to program assembly language (or was it machine language? I
certainly can’t remember, and it was the only time in my life I’ve ever
done so!) in 1978 on one of the Sol
computers he created. This weekend he offers a memoriam to
Bob Bickford.

	Rich Kuslan is blogging business news from Asia.
	Lena Diethelm’s ToonieTimes offers money tips and tax news, like these notes on the usefulness of Section 529 college savings plans.
	Do newspapers aspire to be dull? Dave Cullen thinks so.
	On Golf for Cats, Peter Wilson laments selling his collection of science-fiction pulps, and longs for their “unmatched pulpy smell.”
	She’s Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe: I will happily link to any blog named from a They Might Be Giants song.

Congrats to Diego Doval’s Plan B — a blognovel. It’s the first Salon blog to get a link from Slashdot, and rocket up the charts as hordes of curious geeks amble in to check out the scene.

	Morgan Sandquist, in Gnosis, finds an “almost Shakespearian tone of irony” in the Arcata Eye’s police log. Like vast numbers of other people in the blogosphere Morgan is also reading this diary of a porn store clerk, which apparently was featured recently on This American Life.
	The word sounds wonderful — like some sort of hot-rodded “Mad Max” machine skittering just at the edge of your field of vision — but I can’t say I had any idea what a “scramjet” was till just now. Thanks to David Harris’s science-news blog, I’m learning: “Scramjets are oxygen-breathing engines that work at hypersonic speeds, giving off water as the only by-product and only needing some hydrogen to run.” …And it seems they’ve just tested one in Australia successfully — or at least more successfully than in the past, when the things exploded.
	Dave Cullen’s dueling-leads poll has a winner.
	Michael Bishop is blogging about comics in Words and Pictures Weblog.
	Last night, Joe, of the People are Stupid blog, posted the entire text of Kafka’s grim “Parable of the Doorkeeper.” Today, he reports a “Kafkaesque experience”: he got laid off from a technology startup. Life imitates blog?

Salon Blogs is a week old. Several hundred people have downloaded and installed the software. We had some slow patches with the server the first few days but we think those are a thing of the past (let me know if they’re not).

I’ve seen some posts out there in blogland critical of the fact that Salon is charging for this service. I make no apology for that. As we acknowledge in our FAQ, we know there are plenty of free alternatives out there, and that’s just fine — the Net’s a big place and there’s room for lots of different approaches. But hosting and maintaining a service costs money, and in these post-bubble times it seems reasonable to ask users for a modest fee in return for good service and good software.

I’ve also seen some questions raised about Salon’s viability. Well, we made our latest financing announcement yesterday. Certainly this has been a difficult business in the current downturn. But in the past, everyone who’s bet against our survival has lost. People asked us the same kind of question a year and a half ago when we launched Salon Premium; most of those people have stuck around to renew their subscriptions after the first year.

Wozz offers tips on finding “open source music” — artists who follow the old Grateful Dead model of allowing fans to tape and trade recordings of live shows.

You’ve probably read about the new bankruptcy bill that Congress is this close to passing — it makes it tougher for consumers to declare bankruptcy and wipe out their credit-card debts. The credit card companies are wildly in favor of this, of course (I’d have more sympathy for them if they didn’t so avidly market high-interest cards to people with marginal credit histories). The bill has now gotten tangled up in crossfire between factions in the abortion wars. The Bush Impeachment Countdown has an intriguing Machiavellian explanation for what’s happening.

We’re getting some interesting subject-specific blogs underway:
	David Harris is posting on Science News.
	Tor Andre is reviewing TV shows like “Monk” and “Witchblade.”
	And Jennifer B. Powell is blogging environmental news.

	Albert Delgado is posting Teacher Stories.
	Matt the Heckler finds Tom Delay’s anti-corporate rhetoric ringing a bit hollow.
	What would Salon Blogs be without a Bush Impeachment Countdown? — only the blog, which sports plenty of dirt on the president, does not seem to have an actual countdown. I guess that can only begins after the special prosecutor is appointed.
	John Farr blogs in from Taos, New Mexico, with comments on the end of “open computing” — and a feed of photos that will make you want to hop on the nearest mode of transport and visit his state (I do).
	Diego Doval is unrolling Plan B — a “blognovel” from cubicleland.

	Dave Cullen is posing an interesting question: Three different leads for an op-ed piece. Which is best? He’s also wondering about interactivity on blogs. “I’m just supposed to rant along in monologue?” Well, the comments option is there but, the way Radio UserLand’s interface is set up, the comments tend to be hidden from view. My experience is that the “interactivity” of blogs takes place *between* blogs, as bloggers comment on and link to one another’s posts.
	Christian Crumlish compares Radio UserLand and LiveJournal on Radio Free Blogistan.
	Roots and Branches: Confucian views on the war on terror and the corruption scandals.
	Ken Schellenberg appreciates E. F. Benson’s “Lucia” books on his Book Blog.
	2nd and Beale tracks the Memphis music scene.

Patrick Hurley, my colleague here, just started up a Radio blog from his Mac, and noticed the pages loaded really slowly. This note from UserLand explains the problem — it’s an IE and Mac thing. Worth reading if you’re blogging from an older Mac.