Life is Healthy

A few of us got to have lunch with Neil Gaiman today — he's on tour and stopped by to give a short talk about (and reading from!) his new book, Anansi Boys. Apparently it'll soon be taking the top spot on the NYTimes Bestseller list, and Neil attributes this largely to his Blogger blog. In his talk he mentioned how his blog helps him overcome increasingly-small marketing budgets for his books, and connect directly with his readers and fans.

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CNBC's Morning Call has now started The Morning Blog. It's brand-new still (just announced this morning) but here's what they say it's going to be like:

What you'll get when you log on to TheMorningBlog are the insights about the business news of the day, and more importantly, how we put our show together. [...] You'll find out about our decision-making process: why and how we choose and book guests and segments, what happens when news breaks and how we make sure you get all the market information that's important at that very moment.

If you don't yet have a song stuck in your head, be sure to check out Rocketboom today for the remedy.

On Saturday, the Blogger team squared off against our good friends from Flickr in the sport of kings ... kickball. (Well, it's the sport kings played when they were in grade school).

We're happy to report that the Blogger side emerged victorious with a score of 24 to 17.

Pictured here: Chris Wetherell records the final out while Eric Case gloats over our fallen foes (Cal being one of them)

Photo credit:Jason Sutter.

Jason Goldman demoing Blogger during the blogging tool dance-off.

Reporters Without Borders just released a "Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents:"

"Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles."

[Via BoingBoing]

We've just made it a lot easier for Blogger users to make money using their blogs.

Our new integration with AdSense lets you signup from within Blogger. And we've added a tool for inserting the ads in your blog (so you don't have to mess around with the HTML).

There's even built-in options that will analyze the colors on your blog and choose a recommended color scheme. Check out the mad science, why don'cha.