Friday Blogplugs & the Journals Beta

Hi folks -- going into the weekend, here are a few blogplugged items that people have sent me or tagged with the tag blogplugs, so that they can get them in front of other people:

* From last Saturday, DPoem has an entry going over some of the more notable comments in his blog.

* Down Missouri way, Gif has some photos of flooding in his neighborhood.

* Paul checks in to let us know that CarnviAOL #39 is open for submissions until midnight Sunday -- if you have an entry of yours that you think deserves some attention, send it to Kathi over at MAIL CALL! Supporting the Troops, who's hosting this round.

(I met Kathi last week at the Milblog conference; I need to finish up my thoughts about it -- in the meantime, here's a picture.)

* Monponsett shows off a wicked good clam shack.

* Jimmy checks in; he's been playing around with embedding videos in his Journal, so take a look.

* Boss Nancie sent this to me: Sam, who lives in Georgia and blogs over at Dock Lines got a visit from from UK visitor Jeannette, who blogs over at Welcome to My Travels (private). Check out some entries about it, including video.

* Brian sent me an entry of his that links off to some of his poetry entries.

* Liz of HeroToHero is at it again; her national tour, going around the country collecting shirts from fire, EMS and police first responders to send to deployed troops overseas starts tomorrow (going through June 23rd: "55 Cities - 2 Countries - 30 States -10,000 Miles & 6 Weeks on the Road")

Remember, if you want to blogplug an entry of your own or someone else's, just send it to me at JournalsEditor@aol.com, or better, tag it with blogplugs so that people can see it, or even subscribe to the RSS feed for the tag search.

Notes on the Journals Beta
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So, as I mentioned last week, the next release of AOL Journals (R11b) is currently in beta. We should roll out to production next week, you can see the official writeup on AOL Beta Central; the primary enhancements are:

* When you add a picture from your computer, it will upload to your AOL Pictures shoebox album, and it won't have the white frame around it (you'll still be able to add multiple pictures via AOL Pictures albums ). You can also add photos from photo sharing site Flickr from the picker.

* Open Name Service (ONS) support, so people without AOL or AIM screen names will be able to create and comment in Journals using their e-mail address (they still have to register for an ONS name, though)

* If you have a Webcam, you can record and embed video directly into your Journals. See the All About Me section of my beta Journal, as well as the beta Journal of the team out west (featuring Junaid and Malika) for some examples.

It's great for doing a video All About Me; you'll also be able to embed them directly into regular entries.

I will go into more detail and screenshots in an upcoming entry. For now, if you want to play around with the beta, just add "beta." in front in front of your Journals address -- for me, my beta Journal is at :

http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

Just remember, stuff that you post to your Beta Journal won't make it to your regular Journal -- the two databases are not connected. So only use it for testing purposes.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, journals beta, herotohero, blogplugs