R3 Features: Clarifying My Clarification

Hi folks...just wanted to clarify things about two features in beta right now: Blog About This Entry and Buddy List Rostering, which will both be going live with the R3 release, hopefully next week:

* Blog About This Entry is even more useful
than I originally thought, but only if you're using Microsoft's
Internet Explorer (this includes the browser that you use with your AOL
software). I did not realize this because I was using the Firefox
browser when I tested Blog About This Entry.

So, say I'm looking at the beta version of Product Manager Susan's
entry about privacy settings and online presence (again, you can get to
the Journals beta simply by adding "beta." to the beginning of any
Journal's address),  http://beta.journals.aol.com/blogsinsider/intheknow/entries/804. I have something I want to say about her entry, so I want to do my own blog post talking about it and linking to it.

If
I just click the "Blog about this entry" link in the footer of her
entry, it will pop open a window for a new blog entry; the subject will
be prepopulated, and there will be a hyperlink to Susan's entry -- you
can change both of these, as well as add your own words, just like a
regular entry.  Then, choose which blog of yours you want to
publish to (via the pulldown menu at the bottom), and then you're all
set:

Pretty simple, but it gets better.

If
you're using Internet Explorer, you can "quote" from the Journal entry,
just like you can quote text when you're replying to an e-mail.

What you do is use your mouse to highlight the portion of the entry you want to quote --it can include both words and pictures:

Then,
with the part you want to quote still highlighted, scroll down to
entry's footer and click "Blog about this entry." This will pop up the
window to create a new blog entry, but it will also include the words
and/or pictures you highlighted.

You can then add your own commentary; click save, and it will publish to your blog.

A few notes on this:

* When you use "Blog About This Entry", you should make it clear to people
when you're quoting someone else's blog content. You can do this in a
variety of ways: quotation marks, a different font, dashed lines, etc.
-- anything that shows what part you're quoting, and what part is your
original stuff.

* When you "quote" photos, you're pointing to
the original photo, not a copy. This is known as "hotlinking", and is
sometimes frowned upon, especially if the photo's owner has bandwidth
restrictions. (If the owner finds out and doesn't like it, a typical
form of punishment is to replace the image with a new photo that has
the same name, so the new photo shows up on your page. The new photo
will usually carry a message from the photo owner that says something
like "Stop Hotlinking to This Image" and the new graphic could be
anything from humorous to obscene.)  So you should be sensitive and think before you include other people's photos.

* Buddy List Blog Rostering & Recent Buddies: Blogger Astaryth (Adventures of an Eclectic Mind | Blogspot version)
had a question about this upcoming feature, which will give you the
option of using the people on your Buddy List as the roster for people
who can read your private Journal.

Specifically, she wanted to
know if the people in your "Recent Buddies" group would be allowed to
see your Private Journal, since your Recent Buddies group is composed
of anyone who you send IMs to or read e-mails from.

The answer is no -- the Recent Buddies group is specifically excluded
from the people who can read your Buddy List; if you use Buddy List
Rostering, people will have to be elsewhere in your Buddy List in order
to read your Private Journal.

I could have sworn I saw this answer online somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced the link.

(By the way, if you want to turn off your Recent Buddies group in your Buddy List, just go to your IM Settings -- Keyword: Filtering and Viewing Settings
will jump you to the right tab -- and uncheck the box next to "Add
people I send IMs to or read e-mails from to my Recent Buddies Group."
I had to do this once, back before they upped the limit of people on
your Buddy List.)

Thanks -- Joe