About the new .Netweblogs features
Roy I agree totally with you. But the point here is that I don't want to compete with Microsoft blokes.
Blogging for me has to be spontaneous, maybe a bit buggy, surely rough and sometime with a wrong grammar ;-) .
Of course if you publish a piece of code, you have to be responsible for this and you have to be sure that you are not talking about something untested.
But blogging is also a free expression of our own thoughts. And yes as you say Roy, .netWeblogs is not anymore a true independent community website.
The fact that you can't go back to a mixed mainfeed when you surf down to one of the side is also a bad choice.
And for the noise, yes MSbloggers have noise too !