"I want to commission reviews of the following blog publishing systems:"

I guess this geezer will make a packet from the book he intends to publish out of all the reviews. Good luck to him, a neat idea. I've suggested this I write the reviews for both Radio and Manila.

I've used Radio from the day it came out, OK before that since I was a beta tester. Since I run several manila servers, one for Football fan meat heads who are totally non techie, one for the Government Office for the West Midlands who use it for the intranet for over 500 people. (One of the nice apps I have there is an editable address book—each person owns their page and can edit and upoload images. It can be searched across and surfed across—so you can find out who sits next to who, who's someone's boss, etc.. In any page witin the intranet you can add the shortcut, "Steve Hooker" —link to my page, "Steve Hooker mugshot" —add a picture, "Steve Hooker email" —a link to the spam free email.)

I'm not affiliated to Userland, and I ask what are Radio's limitations, I should be able to write an unbiased report.

Connecting Manila and Radio

Manila and Radio can be connected: I can open up any Manila site with Radio, thus I can edit any page within an outliner on my desktop, adding rules, definitions, and a whole gamut of special instructions for that content. This makes speciality pages on a website easy to make. I use such to create timesheet pages (see thumbnails below).
Using the boilerplate feature these special instructions can be added by non techies who then get on with filling in the blanks.
Using Radio, a folder full of images can be sent to a Manila site simply by pointing a menu at the folder. And it needn't be images, it could be PDFs, Excel documents that make up a databased site. These could even be scheduled.

Radio is a content management designer's dream. A scripting environment on the desk top that can connect to other applications (I'm having great fun with Photoshop at the moment), then publish or FTP 'stuff' to a Manila server or an FTP server. That's putting stuff into a blog; of course, there's the downoload or get from email or the get via XML-RPC connections that I haven't really explored yet. Though I used to email-to-blog from my mobile phone and I webedit to and from other Frontier instalations.

August 25 online seminar by Intelliseek will highlight the influence of bloggers on market perceptions, buying behavior
Blogs are quickly transforming the marketing and branding landscape. Consumers are using them as platforms to talk about products and services. Companies are using them as tools to capitalize on employee loyalty and enthusiasm.
It's called hyperaffilation, when a customer or employee thinks very highy of a product or service. It cannot be astroturfed as Warner Brothers Records found out, and most companies would die to be able to get their 'truth' out there from hundreds of sources. Think of that advertising exec's line, "they'll become a customer when they've seen your name seven times in different contexts," or when they've heard it mentioned in glowing terms from a friend.

Some of the "major findings:"

• Blog trends often pre-date or upstage major news stories, suggesting they can serve as powerful "leading indicators" for marketers
• Teens are highly active bloggers, suggesting that blog-publishing platforms are transforming the habits, practices, and expectations of a key audience for marketers.
• Blog content is easily found through search engines, with the potential to reach broad audiences

Have they ever looked at any teenager blog? Maaaaan! It's ALL about boys (or girls). One thing though, they know their readers, like literally!