Thanks, David, for your thoughts about finding a good (we're not even really talking about "best") way of setting up a weblog.  I'm certainly not happy with the switch to News Item yet.  This plain look is certainly not where I want to get to -- but I found that the other template combined with news items caused overlapping table columns in IE.  Arrgh to Manila.  (I've also been unhappy with the complex table-driven layout and have thought about simplifying the layout....)

The idea of combining Site Notes plus the Metadata plugin was something that I've been pondering.  Radio allows one to classify a post in more than one category wherease news items belong to one and only department. 

I think that some caution against overcomplexification is in order, especially for those of us who dream of finding the perfect scheme.  What Dave Winer has taught me through his blog is that a jumble of many topics under the sun placed in the same place can be fairly effective -- if you follow his narrative all the time.  But Dave also uses the mechanism of repackaging thoughts into Stories and entries for DaveNet -- something I haven't done too much of but which I think is a great idea.

I'm fairly excited about Instant Outlining since I do a huge amount of my info gathering/thinking in Ecco Pro.  A little programming project I have in the back of my mind is to program Ecco to produce and consume OPML so that I can start getting into this who I/O business.  But is it a priority right now?....

BTW, David, how do you get an indication of how much many responses you have to a given news item in your blog?  Did you write a macro?