Occasionally people write asking how I choose "featured" blogs. There is really no science to it. I occasionally browse through and look for popular blogs or blogs that look well written or different... that's about it. As the site has grown (there are around 6,000 blogs now) it is impossible to really read through them all and keep up with them.

I have had a few complaints from people that I don't change the featured very often.. and every time I explain that I just have limited time, and ask that they send back suggestions of blogs to look at for the feature section. Every time, I have never received a response back.

Anyway, I am looking for suggestions for featured bloggers. I will browse through and pick some suggested blogs to feature -- but don't expect that every one will be featured (and don't be insulted if i don't feature it). There are just too many great blogs out there. I'm looking to offer varied, fairly family friendly content to feature... as these are some of the first things people see when they visit the site and we want to have as many different voices join as possible to add to our community. Also if you see one that has changed for the worse or has not been updated in a while let me know and I will consider removing it. You can add a comment to this publically or privately. Please do not request your own blog be featured.

If you suggest a blog, please cut/paste the blog URL such as:

myfavoriteblog.blogstream.com

so that I can more easily find it.

For all Blogstream Members:

http://cgi.greetingcards.com/cb/37-918/pickup?ID=A222-5W8A-WTJE-RDR

If you want more free coverage for your blog, you can add it to Yahoo... do the following:

• Go to Yahoo Signup Page

• Either login (if you already have a Yahoo ID) or Signup if you don't, and then login. It's free to signup. If you have a Yahoo ID from email or some other part of Yahoo, that should work.

• After you register and login, you should be brought to this page:

  http://publisher.yahoo.com/submit.php

  If not, click on the link above to go to that page. This is the "RSS Submission page".

• Scroll down to the box that says "Add RSS Feed by URL". Enter:

  http://(YOUR_BLOG_URL).blogstream.com/rss.xml

  Replace (YOUR_BLOG_URL) with the url for your personal blog site. For example:

  http://news.blogstream.com/rss.xml

  Then click "Add". If all goes well your blog will be indexed into Yahoo's search and be available in their News search (the Yahoo news search now searches blogs that have been added in this way). It may take a day or two for your blog to be properly indexed.

It should only take about 5 minutes, it's really not as complicated as it may look.

Sorry this is not easier, I have contacted Yahoo to try and automate this but this is the best they have so far.

I think i caught a bug where some blogs were not updating... it would be very rare and no data would be lost, basically you would post and the changes might not have appeared until someone else posted or commented to your blog.

Just a stupid programming error.. should be fixed now. Noticed it this morning when I wrote a blog post and it never appeared. (Now hopefully I didn't screw anything else up!)

Ok, maybe I'm tooting my own horn... but I love the private reply feature! You guys send me so many notes through the comments and it use to take me forever to reply since I had to go into your blog to send a private message. Now i just click the "reply" button! Definitely the biggest time saver so far. Never thought that it would be this useful!

By the way, only 6 more blogs and we will have hit 5,000 blogs with at least one post!