The new Atom is here! The new Atom is here!

The Atom syndication format is pretty much baked; see http://atompub.org/ for the version 1.0 spec.  It'll take a while to get an RFC number and the vanity license plate, but barring typos it's final.

(Next step: Defining the general Atom protocol standard, which will enable interoperable use of Atom for things like blog editors.)

Blog This

With our latest rev of Journals, we've enabled a new Blog This feature.  You need a special "bookmarklet" to take advantage of it.  Since Journals prevents pages hosted on aol.com from hosting Javascript, I have to give the ugly Javascript code for the link in plain text:

javascript:q=""+(window.getSelection?window.getSelection():document.getSelection?
document.getSelection():document.selection.createRange().text);void(
window.open('http://journals.aol.com/_do/blog_this?js='+escape(document.title)+'&
je='+(q?escape('"'+q+'"'):escape(location.href)),'_top'))

Create a bookmark and copy and paste the Javascript URL above into the URL box. Then, select it when you're looking at a page you want to comment on.  It will bring you directly to an Add Entry page with a default title and text.  (If you select text on the original page first, it will copy that over automatically.)

New beta feaure: Journals panel

Cool new beta feature in AOL Explorer (http://beta.aol.com/projects/aolexplorer/index.html?): The Journals side panel.  I'm posting this from AOL Explorer right now.  Very nice.

This version lets you drag and drop selected text from the page you're viewing in the main browser tab.  Really handy for commenting on things!