No more "waiting for crispads" is such a brilliant thing I can't begin to praise it enough.
I like your syndication ideas. And personally I liked the idea of separating "user menus" from the "content menus." Speaking of which I have a block called "Menu" which seems to duplicate the "Home" button at the top. Likewise the block "Metatone" ($Username) repeats the menu "Metatone's Page." This suggests we could do some moving around of stuff to reduce duplication, freeing up space for other stuff.
Personally I think the "drop down" of Booman Tribune doesn't quite work, so maybe it needs rethinking? Specifically, since it only shows up when I roll over it, I never see it. And once I've conceived the intention to look, it's as easy to go to BT and look, because sometimes the titles are a bit cryptic.
For myself, I'd say syndication needs to sit in an always visible box. But maybe other people use the dropdown a lot?
If it's the latter and anyone can play it could be interesting to have a long list of affilate blogs at the left, and show their current headlines in mouse-over drop-downs. That would allow quicker access to other sites, more of an overview of what's happening out there, and also more of a networky sense of wider involvement.
If you try to show titles and headlines without drop-downs, if the available space only allows two or three headline lists and the network grows, you're going to get an increasingly small slice of what's happening out there.
Although I suppose it could be a combination of both, with your favourite two or three sites shows in full and drop downs for the rest.
The current one does only "stories" and misses any promoted diaries to the Front Page. There would have to be a proper "frontpage" feed, as well as a (10 most) "recent diaries" feed and a (10 most) "recommended diaries" feeds. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Embedding headlines for lots of pages would make the page very big very quickly unless you're doing something AJAX like.
