Blip.TV rolled out some new features. While I'm not sure that they were necessarily designed for people like me (Blip seems to focus on content creators rather than consumers), it seems like the site might be a little friendlier for me to use. The non-video explanation of these features are sort of hidden in their dev blog, so here they are:

* You asked for it. You get it. Comment notification! The catch? It's turned off by default. So turn it on! With comment notification turned on you'll get an e-mail every time someone posts a comment to one of your blip posts. We're considering making this the default setting. We may even do it tomorrow. Any complaints?
* User blogs are now sticky! And you can customize your blog's sidebar! For an example, check out Jared's blog on blip.tv. Notice that:
o When you visit jklett.blip.tv you stay on jklett.blip.tv -- no more redirection to blip.tv/?user=jklett!
o See that bit on the upper-right side? That's written by Jared, in real HTML, but with a rich text editor. See the next point!
* You can now customize your own blog's sidebar. Check it out: Your blip.tv blog preferences. Another example of the custom sidebar can be seen on my blip.tv blog. Check out that blogroll!
* We fixed our design a bit. In the old design the right sidebar would overlap content on the left if you sized the browser window too small. That shouldn't happen anymore (and there was much rejoicing from certain blip developers).
* We have a new rich text editor. It's much nicer than the old one, and should generate nicer HTML. It also (sort of) works on Safari.
* We have FOAF! That's "Friend of a Friend" for the uninitiated. So now you can tell us who your friends are. There's not much you can do with this right now, but you'll see, there's lots of cool stuff coming :-)
* The applet is now live. But only for Mac users, and only in Safari. And it's Alpha. Still, if you've got a Mac, fire up Safari and record some Quicktime video right inside your browser! You can use it with the iSight or with your camcorder. You can even use it with video you shot with your camcorder last week. It'll pull the video off whatever device you're using, it'll encode it as Quicktime, and it'll upload it to blip. Check out Jared's post about the applet, since he's the one who's writing it!
* There are lots of little bug fixes. Some of them we've talked about before, some we haven't. Cross-posting to Typepad works now. A few weird behaviors you'd see with weird browsers on weird platforms are fixed. There are a few new ones we're working on.

As someone who doesn't vlog, but who is interested in the site, I welcome these additions. Altho I find it strange that some of the new features are being developed for one the world's least used browsers, Safari. That still puts them ahead of sites like Odeo, that haven't rolled out their audio recording on any browser. Still, I find the Safarinessisity odd.

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