I made some quick fixes to the Blog List page (available on the bottom of the front page of the site).

Specifically I fixed the Page Number system -- it is now in a pulldown which made the page cleaner and it also shows the first letter of the section available on a page. For example, if you are looking by blog name and want to jump to blogs beginning with the letter M, look in the pulldown for a page number followed by the letter M.

I have made the comment page more clear (stating who you are commenting to, from, etc.) and also hitting "enter" now skips a line similar to doing a blog post. No need to enter HTML codes anymore to skip lines in a comment.

Update: Just added comment "navigation" over the icon on the right. Lets you skip forward and backward on comments more quickly. First button skips to top of comments, next skips to previous comment, next one skips to next comment and last button skips to end of comments. It's like the buttons on a DVD player (Fast forward, rewind, etc).

Testing a new feature -- ever want to reply to a comment publically, but also respond directly to another member?

Now you can click "CC" next to a members comment, and your comment reply will both be posted publically on the blog and CC'd to that person via email... so you don't have to wait for them to come back and read it.

It only lets you CC one person at a time right now, although I am considering some kind of checkbox next to each comment that would let you CC a bunch of people at once.

Let me know how it works.

I am excited to announce the testing of VIDEO blogs and profiles here at blogstream!

I just got the first part setup tonight, where you can setup a video profile.

The next phase will be to allow you to post video blogs (if you want to).

Some of you will like it, some won't -- nobody will be required to use it. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of being recorded .. but I am excited to see what many of the creative members here can do with this!

To do it, you need to have a webcam and have Macromedia Flash installed in your browser. 95% of you have Flash installed already -- it is pretty standard. Webcams are really cheap now... i think you can get them under $20. Nothing fancy is required.

To see my video profile, just click on my profile link at the right. When the page comes up, click on the "P >" button in the video window.

I threw something together just to show you how it works. As I said, i'm not great at being recorded... I'll do something a little nicer when I get some time.

If you create one, post a comment here so we can all check it out!

The "video blogs" are not ready yet but I'll post here as soon as they are... I think those will be great for some of you. I can imagine things like short tutorials, movie reviews, weather reports, "60 second news", telling a joke, whatever! There are a ton of great ideas that can go with this.

It is completely free right now to use this feature... I "MAY" have to charge a small fee for those people that wish to create video in the future... we will have to see how the test works out.

I just added the ability to email a post link to people. Just click on the little email icon under a blog post.