After eight months, thousands of posts and more bloggers than we can count, NPR has decided that yes, this blogging thing might have some legs.

So we're going to do more blogs. Leroy Siever's My Cancer blog is already a success. We'll also be doing other blogs in the coming months, including one that will be focused more on the news. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, Mixed Signals has run its course. A large percentage of our news staff has spent time blogging, and we now have a better idea of what we want the blog to be. The scattershot nature of Mixed Signals didn't really work. We've also learned just how important a blog's readers are to blogging well. We've gotten some amazing responses from you on various things we've posted. But I think we need to do better in setting up a two-way street with our readers and with other blogs. I think that blogs are best when they're driven by personal passion, or a shared common passion and style. We're going to let our new blogger (and the search is still on -- you can apply here) help us develop the style of the blog and form what the blog should be.

We also want you, our readers, to tell us what you think NPR should be doing in the blogosphere. What did we do right, and what did we do wrong? What should we do more of, or less of? What cool online tools do you think we should be using to improve the way we interact with the public? This page will be up for a while and we will be posting your comments. We want to engage with you as we create more blogs.

All this comes at a time when we're rearranging our newsroom to try and bring us even more into the digital world. As for me, through some twist of fate I'm not sure I fully understand, I'm off to Iraq for a month, then back to serve as... wait for it... acting managing editor for Digital Media. I cackle quietly, but with great satisfaction. The suits have finally lost it.

It's been a good run for Mixed Signals. I had a lot of fun blogging. Where else can I expound on Iraq, the weirdness of Scientology and get really excited when world leaders start calling each other Satan. And on top of all that, they paid me, too.

Anyway, thanks for reading...

My favorite summer job when I was in college was working as a Good Humor ice cream man. I lived in New York City, where ice cream was sold from a pushcart rather than a truck. Every day I'd go to the Good Humor headquarters on the Lower East Side and fill up my cart with an assortment of Toasted Almonds, Chocolate Eclairs and Strawberry Shortcake. To say it was a picaresque neighborhood would be putting it mildly. The Hell's Angels motorcycle gang had their Manhattan home on the very same street. So from time to time, a few really enormous guys in cut off leather jackets would wander in for a frosty summer treat. Or two. Or more. Naturally, I was always very happy to oblige. Then I'd wheel out my cart through the streets of Manhattan to an assigned corner where I'd hawk ice cream for the day.

I was reminded of all this today when I read a story about Good Humor's deal with pet food producer Pedigree. Together, they're going to make -- no joke -- ice cream sandwiches for dogs. I wonder what the Hell's Angels would say.

Clayton Hansen/iStockphoto

The Internet search giant plans to install more than 9,200 solar panels at their Silicon Valley headquarters.

Google announced with much fanfare today that it is converting part of its "Googleplex" headquarters in Silicon Valley to solar power. By next spring, some 9,200 solar panels are expected to produce enough electricity to power 1,000 homes. "We hope corporate America is paying attention. We want to see a lot of copycats" of this project, said David Radcliffe, Google's vice president of real estate.

Bully for Google, but don't forget that big Internet and computing companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are voracious consumers of electricity. For example, they all have vast air-conditioned complexes called server farms where tens of thousands of powerful computers do what it takes so we can surf the Web.

Google has an estimated 500,000 to one million servers that churn out 2.7 billion online searches a month. That takes a lot of juice. But as much as Google likes to tout its eco-friendly projects like solar panels, it is tight-lipped about those power-thirsty servers lined up as far as the eye can see. According to Fortune Magazine, Google enjoys "discussing its data centers about as much as the NSA enjoys discussing its code-breaking techniques."

No wonder. A single data center gobbles up enough electricity to power a city of 40,000 people.

Information is the lifeblood of the news business. Information about politicians or corporations, whatever the subject, whether flattering or damning, confidential or easily accessible -- it's what journalists need to do their daily work. So in most cases, news organizations can be relied upon to make information public. But now the taxpayer-financed British Broadcasting Corporation is in a fight to block the release of a report on its coverage of the Middle East. According to The Telegraph:

"The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism."

An information tribunal found in favor of Steven Sugar, a lawyer who went to court to get access to the Middle East report. The BBC is appealing, saying the case has "wider implications to the way the [Freedom of Information] Act applies to public broadcasters."

This just in: Actor Wesley Snipes has been indicted on tax fraud charges. The government is accusing him of falsely claiming refunds of nearly $12 million in 1996 and 1997. According to the indictment, he also failed to file tax returns in six other years. Federal prosecutors say Snipes used an accounting firm called American Rights Litigators that had a history of filing false returns for clients.

The population of the United States officially hit 300 million at 7:46 a.m. EDT today. But even the officials at the Census Bureau who track such things aren't swearing by the official number. "I don't think anybody believes it will be the precise moment when the population hits 300 million," Howard Hogan of the Census Bureau told the Associated Press shortly before the appointed minute. "We're confident that we're somewhat close."

Just as in horseshoes, close is good enough when it comes to demographics. Close has certainly been good enough for the media organizations that are using the occasion to take stock of big changes in the U.S. population. Listen to Robert Smith's piece on Monday's All Things Considered. In a column in today's Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required), Joel Kotkin describes a place "where few Manhattan or Washington pundits venture" that exemplifies three big trends: suburbanization, the growth of the Sunbelt and the country's burgeoning ethnic diversity. It's Fort Bend County near Houston.

"The largely affordable middle-class suburb has a population that is just under half white, one fifth African American, one-fifth Hispanic and around 12 percent Asian. It's the new American melting pot, and, more or less, it's working."

Here in Washington, D.C., the hippest music club with the longest lines is called the 9:30 Club. At NPR, we have a 9:30 club of sorts, our morning news meeting. People don't line up to get in, but at least we don't have tough looking bouncers by the front door.

Here's the latest from our 9:30 meeting: Look for a variety of interesting pieces and conversations coming up on subjects ranging from detainee legislation to dietary guidelines for eating seafood.

President Bush has just signed the controversial bill that sets out guidelines for the interrogation of terror suspects and trials before military commissions. John Hendren will report for All Things Considered about how the new law will affect the military. Now that North Korea has set off one nuclear device, will it test another? And then another? And is there any effective deterrence left now that North Korea has joined the nuclear club? One thing is certain, reports NPR's Mike Shuster: The North Korea test was a blow to the nuclear non-proliferation movement.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, the marathon balloting over the next two-year seat on the Security Council continues. It's Guatemala versus Venezuela, with Guatemala in the lead, but lacking the two-thirds majority needed to secure the seat. Venezuela is blaming the U.S. for stifling its bid. But did Hugo Chavez's "Bush is the devil" speech at the U.N. hurt his country's chances of getting a seat at the big table? NPR's Michele Keleman will have the latest.

Confused about the health warnings about eating seafood? Which fish are safe to eat, and how often can you eat them? Alison Aubrey will be on Day to Day and All Things Considered with the latest science on diet and seafood.

In Chicago, city of broad shoulders and open outcry commodities trading, there's a big deal brewing. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has agreed to buy the parent company of its cross-town rival, the Chicago Board of Trade. It's an $8 billion transaction involving institutions with roots dating back to the 1800s. But this pairing isn't about history. It's about the future, and futures trading in the global economy. NPR's David Schaper will give us the story from Chicago.

On Talk of the Nation, listen for a conversation about the federal government's underground war room in Colorado. The retreat comes equipped with a convenience store, a medical clinic and a barbershop. Now it's going into quasi-retirement. It won't be shut forever. Instead, it's being put on something called "warm standby." No word yet on what happens to the groceries.

Quick update on civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart. She's been sentenced to 28 months in prison. Prosecutors had wanted 30 years.

We'll have a story on All Things Considered in a little bit from NPR's Margot Adler.

Artsem Martysiuk/iStockPhoto

Former New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove argues that "gossip can be good for society."

The one time I made a V.P. of news literally blanch was when I suggested that I was going to put a gossip segment on a show I was starting. The segment, of course, never saw the light of day. Probably a good decision, but Lloyd Grove, the now former gossip columnist at the New York Daily News, has a fun piece over at the L.A. Times defending gossip as good for society:

"The most satisfying gossip column offers a dollop of drama, conflict and misbehavior, along with a dash of hypocrisy and humor. It views this complicated world through the prism of personality -- and makes things, if temporarily, accessible and comprehensible. It also -- and here, arguably, is the socially redeeming part -- is the great leveler, demonstrating that the rich and famous have as many foibles as the rest of us. And it shows that we're all in this together as members of a human community, even if it's whispering behind someone's back."

Grove also shares some great stories about being threatened by various poobahs. Read the whole thing. And he's over at Gawker this week writing "Ask Lloyd Grove."

Kevin Poulsen over at Wired has an amazing story about how he wrote a program that compared MySpace profiles with registered sex offenders. Poulsen's investigation ended up in the jailing of Andrew Lubrano for soliciting sex from a minor online:

"In May, I began an automated search of MySpace's membership rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, mined from the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry Web site -- a gateway to the state-run Megan's Law Web sites around the country. I searched on first and last names, limiting results to a five-mile radius of the offender's registered ZIP code.

Wired News will publish the code under an open-source license later this week.

The code swept in a vast number of false or unverifiable matches. Working part time for several months, I sifted the data and manually compared photographs, ages and other data, until enhanced privacy features MySpace launched in June began frustrating the analysis.

Excluding a handful of obvious fakes, I confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data. Of those, 497 are registered for sex crimes against children. In this group, six of them are listed as repeat offenders, though Lubrano's previous convictions were not in the registry, so this number may be low. At least 243 of the 497 have convictions in 2000 or later."

As Poulsen points out, this only works with sex offenders who are A.) registered and B.) obtuse enough to use their own names. But it does show that certainly some sexual predators are using MySpace as a hunting ground.

(via Boing Boing)

You busy for the next three years? Maurizio Montalbini, an Italian sociologist, is spending his next thousand days or so in a cave. It's an experiment to find out something about the body's natural cycles. Interestingly, he did it in the '90s for a year, so I guess he likes the whole subterranean thing. Not sure about the diet though. From the BBC:

"Although he plans nourish himself with food pills, he has also brought supplies of honey, nuts and chocolate.

Mr Montalbini, a keen caver, will drink water from a small pipe during the more than 1,000 days he will spend underground. But he is not worried about missing out on lasagna. In fact he suspects the days will fly by too quickly…

In an earlier attempt, Mr Montalbini's sense of time was shifted by a lack of exposure to natural light.

'When I remained 366 days underground, I had the impression of only spending 219 days,' he said."

Politics seems to be the lead today. We're looking at the Missouri Senate race tonight and following the ethics committee hearings today. Day to Day is looking at the Iraq war as an election issue. Only three weeks to Election Day, so it's starting to get ugly.

Not a whole lot of events for the president, although he and Condoleezza Rice are meeting with John Bolton today. [Update: The meeting between Rice, Bush, and Bolton has been cancelled.]

Speaking of Bolton, the U.N. votes today on whether Venezuela gets a Security Council seat. The U.S., obviously, thinks it's a bad idea and has been lobbying others to make sure someone else gets the Latin America seat.

A truck bomb in Sri Lanka killed at least 92 sailors and wounded more than 150 today. Police believe that Tamil Tiger suicide bombers carried out the attack, the biggest since a cease-fire deal was made in 2002.

NPR's Deborah Amos has what sounds like a very interesting piece on All Things Considered tonight on reforming Islam from within the Muslim world. The 300 millionth American will be born tomorrow morning -- we'll be looking at that tonight. And, of course, we'll follow up on the Lynne Stewart sentencing.

Lynne Stewart is a long-time civil rights lawyer. She represented Omar Abdel Rahman, the one-eyed sheik who is serving a life sentence for a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Stewart, herself, is being sentenced today for "blatantly and repeatedly" violating prison regulations by helping her client communicate with his followers. NPR's Margot Adler has a piece on Stewart this morning, who now says she was naive. From the piece:

Adler: In a letter to the Judge, John Koeltl, Stewart has expressed her regrets. Her goal was to improve the prison conditions of her client, she says, but she was naive not to realize that what might have been considered legitimate before Sept. 11 would now be interpreted as criminal. "At the time I didn't see this," she wrote. "I see and understand it now." She says she should have fought the constitutionality of the prison regulations in court. She now says she wants Judge Koeltl to see.

Stewart: My flaws, my weaknesses, my tendency to let my heart run ahead of my head.

Adler: And most of all she wants to set the record straight to dispel the notion that…

Stewart: If you are a left-winger, as I am -- and maybe a radical left-winger as I am always called -- that that somehow feeds into an Islamic kind of an agenda, the two couldn't be further apart. We are inclusive people, they are exclusive people, they want a theocracy.

The government wants Stewart to be sentenced to 30 years.

Listen to the whole thing.

Update: 3:59 p.m. EDT -- Quick update on civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart. She's been sentenced to 28 months in prison. Prosecutors had wanted 30 years. We'll have a story on All Things Considered in a little bit from NPR's Margot Adler.

All this week on Morning Edition, Jason Beaubien has been reporting on why many African nations seem unable to make forward progress. One serious impediment: seemingly endless civil wars.

And tonight, Michele Kelemen reports on Uganda, which has suffered civil war for twenty years, and the hopes that the U. S. might be able to bolster a fragile peace process. Keleman speaks with Grace Akolla, who was abducted by Uganda's main rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, and forced to become a child soldier in the conflict. At issue -- what needs to come first: peace or justice? Should the LRA's leader be offered amnesty?

With that, I'm signing off and turning Mixed Signals over to my esteemed colleague, JJ Sutherland, who will be blogging on Monday before he returns to Iraq.

I'm guessing that the word "curds" does not leap to mind when you are doing your laundry. Frankly, I'm not even sure what a laundry "curd" is, although I can kind of guess (yuck). That's why the American Chemical Society, which bills itself as "the world's largest scientific society," is honoring Tide detergent this month:

"The development of Tide -- the 'washing miracle' synthetic detergent -- by Procter & Gamble will be designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark in a special ceremony in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 25... Tide, the first heavy duty synthetic detergent, debuted in 1946, the culmination of a search to replace traditional soaps, which did not clean well in hard water and deposited a reside of scum, or curds."

This announcement probably won't get as much attention as, say, the Nobel Prize announcements. But "Tide is an interesting story," insists Judah Ginsberg of the ACS. Apparently, chemists knew by the mid-1930s that synthetic detergents wouldn't leave curds, but the detergents also wouldn't work well on really dirty clothes. Scientists knew that they could improve the synthetics' cleaning power by adding a chemical called a "builder." But the builders left the clothes feeling harsh and stiff. The whole thing seemed hopeless.

But at Procter & Gamble, one researcher named David Byerly refused to give up on what was known within the company as "Project X." He had a counterintuitive breakthrough. Instead of assuming that he should add as little "builder" as possible, he threw in a whole bunch -- even more than the cleaning agent. The surprising result was clean and soft clothes.

Tide became what's known as a disruptive technology -- it was so much better than everything else, it blew away the competition and quickly became the dominant technology out there. You can read about its creation here, in an excerpt from a book called Rising Tide, a history of Procter & Gamble.

Friday the 13th inspires a kind of horror among the superstitious. There hasn't been too much weirdness in the news today (unless you live in Buffalo... good luck shoveling all that snow!) Maybe we are blase about it, since this is the second Friday the 13th this year (we had one in January, don't forget).

From Wikipedia, we learn that "the fear of Friday the 13th is called 'paraskavedekatriaphobia' (alternate spelling paraskavidekatriaphobia, paraskevidekatriaphobia) or 'friggatriskaidekaphobia,' specialized forms of triskaidekaphobia, a phobia (fear) of the number thirteen."

Good grief! I don't fear the day, but I do fear the thought of having to pronounce any of those words on the air. Broadcast reporting is so much more difficult than print reporting when it comes to superlongandcrazywords.

Maybe that's why NPR hasn't run a lot of stories on Friday the 13th, at least not that I could find in our archive. But the Friday the 13 story is a perennial favorite for reporters who go around asking people if anything strange has happened to them. And National Geographic ran an interesting story a while back on why this day is supposedly so unlucky.

Today, NPR was not just reporting news, but making news. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times (in an earlier story and an updated one) reported that Bill Marimow would no longer be running NPR's news division.

The name Bill Marimow probably means nothing to those of you who don't follow news. But journalists around the country know him as one of the nation's best. He's been in journalism for over three decades and won the Pulitzer Prize -- twice -- for reporting on police brutality. He came to NPR in May of 2004; he was promoted to his current position earlier this year.

Yesterday, rumors started circulating that Marimow was being forced out of NPR -- a prospect that filled many reporters here with dismay. But today, we learned that Marimow was going to be NPR's ombudsman, someone who critiques the organization as the public's representative. The New York Times characterized this as "a lower position" and a demotion.

This morning, a couple of hundred people trooped down to the big conference room on the first floor at 10:30 am, to finally get the official version of what was going on.

NPR's far-flung correspondents called in. Jay Kernis, Marimow's boss and NPR's senior vice-president, sat on a stool in the front of the room. He briefly announced what we'd already read in the newspapers; Marimow would be the ombudsman. Then he told us that Ellen Weiss, the national desk editor, would serve in Marimow's old position as NPR launches a search for a new executive. There were additional management reshufflings as well that were discussed in detail. Kernis had kind words to say about everyone. Weiss made a few remarks and received applause. Both speakers made a few jokes, and people laughed, but the mood of the audience was somewhat solemn.

Read the full story after the jump.

The daily 9:30 a.m. news meeting was full of names today. No, not name-calling... the names of people that NPR's editors and reporters are chasing for features and news.

Some names you'd recognize, some names you would not:

First lady Laura Bush, who continues to be popular at a time when other Republicans are having to deal with political controversies. Madonna, who may or may not have agreed to adopt an infant from Africa. Muhammad Yunus, the new Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Less recognizable names: Grace Akolla, a woman who was abducted as a child and forced to serve as a solider in Uganda. General Sir Richard Dannatt, who's been saying that Britain should withdraw its troops from Iraq.

The Coca-Cola Company is developing a new drink, Enviga, that it says can actually make you lose weight. Today's story in The Wall Street Journal takes an appropriately skeptical look at the science behind the idea of a calorie-burning soft drink.

The real question: Will it still work if it's deep fried?

I had the odd sensation today of simultaneously loving two stories on Morning Edition that seemed to totally contradict each other.

The first story covered the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the idea of "micro-credit." He founded the Grameen Bank, which gives business loans to impoverished people who could never qualify for loans from an ordinary bank (even if the bank felt like it was worth the bother to lend someone $50). The fine folks in Oslo announced his win early this morning. NPR quickly dug into its vast archive and produced this fascinating report. In it, Yunus explained that he'd made a vow never to ask for a job. Instead, he'd create jobs. When people ask him how he can possibly do that, he answers, "Ask your mother."

Maybe it was just the coffee kicking in, but I had this little happy glow after hearing about Yunus. I thought, "Gee, I'm glad that this morning gave me one little moment of hope in a world that often seems just so overwhelmingly pointless and sad." I was thinking that I desperately wanted to hear more stories like this one.

But then I heard this report, an interview with Daniel Handler, the author of the best-selling Lemony Snicket books. These children's books feature the orphans Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, who go through "A Series of Unfortunate Events." As the author puts his poor protagonists through one horror after another, he repeatedly warns his readers to stop reading such a depressing and demoralizing book. But his young fans -- who got to interrogate him on Morning Edition -- say they are "unhappy book" people who find happy stories "really boring." Handler agrees, saying he thinks we're somehow inbred to like stories in which disastrous things happen. He said it would be difficult to think of an interesting story that has a lot of happy things going on in it.

So, happy stories or sad ones? Which would you rather hear?

So long. I go back to my regular gig as health reporter tomorrow. Your blogger tomorrow is my Science Desk colleague Nell Boyce.

If you happen to be in Raleigh this month, stop by the North Carolina State Fair for a Coca-Cola-infused funnel cake. Or not.

Here's how it's made: Take funnel cake batter. Add Coke. Pour into deep fryer. Serve in Coca-Cola cup with coke syrup, powdered sugar and a cherry.

Deep-fried Coke cake seems to be making the fair circuit this year. It was served up in Texas last month.

As a health reporter, I'm interested to know how many people actually try it. Would you?

Science correspondent Joe Palca has a fascinating little story on All Things Considered tonight.

Joe reports on how many genes it takes to make a bacterium called Carsonella. There's nothing special about this particular bacterium. But the research into the bacterium sheds light on how few genes are needed to make an independent life form. In this case, it's just 182.

Sometime this month the U.S. population will reach 300 million. The Pew Research Center and the Pew Hispanic Center have compiled an analysis of the population growth, broken down by race/ethnicity and nativity of the 100 million people who were added to the population since 1966.

It turns out, 36 percent of the new population is Hispanic, followed by 34 percent white, 16 percent black and 13 percent Asian and Pacific Islander. For a much better visual of these numbers, check out the Pew Hispanic Center's fact sheet (PDF), which is full of lots of interesting reports and analysis chronicling the Latino experience.

NPR's Ari Shapiro made the New York Times crossword puzzle today (paid subscription required). He's 16 across. "Shapiro of NPR."

This isn't the first time the puzzle's turned to the useful string of letters "A-R-I." Ari's debut in the Times crossword was last February. He says he hung a framed copy of that puzzle in his bathroom.

And crossword puzzles aren't the only place where you can spot a familiar name from NPR. According to an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, one of Wisconsin's top goat cheesemakers is a public radio fan. Anne Topham of Fantome Farm told the newspaper that she names her goats after inspiring women. Her herd includes Cokie and Nina, honoring NPR's Cokie Roberts and Nina Totenberg.