Whelp, its official. The useability changes that I mentioned a while back are starting to show up in the Publisher and Reader user interfaces.

The feedback was great, and very helpful. We listened to it all and did the final implementation based on what we heard. Gone are the notion of "Permalinks" and the '#' symbol to denote the permanent archival link that a post will always be available at. We've replaced those with the self-evident "Permanent Link". We've also dumped the term "RSS" from most of the interfaces with the exception of those references that are directly tied to a specific syndication format. So for example, whereas a Publisher used to use the "Choose RSS format" to pick the syndication format they wanted, they now use the "Choose syndication format" dialog that allows them to choose between "RSS 0.91", "RSS 1.0" and "RSS 2.0"

We also chose to avoid the "horseless carriage" mistake that Chris Cummer blogged about. We've preserved the term "trackback" because, as he rightly points out, thats what it is. For better or worse, like the term "blog", that's what we've got and it is what it is.

And for those bloggers that want to continue using the more conventional cues, these changes only effect the stock Blogware template set - there's nothing stopping any Blogware Publisher from modifying the look and feel of their own blog to suit their own tastes.

We also cleaned up a few of our own gaffs as well ("Admin" instead of the more appropriate "Administrator") and a few other things as well. We've also missed a bunch of simplifications as well - I'm looking forward to figuring out what they are.