R3 Successfully Installed

Morning, folks -- looks like Release 3 of Journals 2.0 (otherwise known as R3) was successfully installed early this morning.

Again, you can check Journals Product Manager Susan's entry about the R3 features, though in a nutshell, they're:

* Blog About This Entry: When you're visiting another AOL Journal, and you see an entry you want to blog about, you can click the "Blog about this entry" link in the footer, which will open up a compose window that will have that entry's link prepopulated.

Also, for users of the Internet Explorer browser (like the one that comes with AOL), you can easily quote from the blog you're looking at: Just highlight the text you want with your mouse before you click "Blog about this entry." You can see my detailed instructions on how to do this.

You can then edit it like a regular blog entry, and choose which of your blogs you want it to publish to.

For example, that's how I'm posting this entry right now -- I visited blogger John's entry on Your Monday Photo Shoot: Body Parts, and have edited it to make this entry.

* Notify AOL Link on Every Post: This one is pretty straightforward -- there's a notify link in the footer of every entry, instead of just in the top nav bar.

I know some of you are concerned that this will lead to an avalanche of spurious flagging, but I doubt it -- as noted, there was already a Notify AOL link in the top nav bar, which pretty much showed up on every post, anyway -- this footer link primarily affects posts on your blog's main page, and the effect should be that it will make it easier for the CAT team to verify valid TOS complaints and dump spurious complaints, because they'll be looking at specific entries, not hunting around trying to find the entry someone complained about.

* Buddy List Rostering: A neat feature, though you don't have to use it. If you have a  private Journal, you can click a check box, and make it so that your entire Buddy List can read your Journal (instead of having to add them one at a time). Plus, as you update your Buddy List, your private Journal will keep up with the changes (it only goes one way, though).

We'reworking on making this more useful, so you can add specific groups instead of your entire Buddy List. See Susan's entry about R3 and rostering for important information on using Buddy List Rostering.

Thanks -- Joe