Steve Kirks is the product manager for Radio at UserLand. Very good news.

I like Radio, it was a very innovative product, we wrote tools for it and we are hosting Radio UserLand sites for Italian, French and German users.

Still, I have been thinking about moving my weblogs to some other platform, mostly because I want to feel the excitement of new features. Radio is doing for me today exactly what it was doing last year, which is okay, but how about all those great new features that we were getting during Radio's first year?

But where to move to? Manila? MT? Word Press? I don't know, I've seen them all, they are very good products but none fully convinced me. The main reason is that I'm very comfortable with Radio and I very much like the idea of running the application locally and not on some remote server.

Running server applications is good in many cases, it's what we do for a living, but a blogging tool belongs to the desktop (and anyway, I can access my copy of Radio running on my office's Mac from anywhere in the world). I can drop a full bunch of files in a folder and the get automagically rendered and upstreamed to my weblog, this is something I'm doing all the time I cannot live without.

For some time we have also been thinking about developing our own tool since Radio felt an abandoned product (no updates, bug fixes and new features for a while). This is why the news of Steve joining UserLand as Radio pm is great, it gives us hope and motivation to support a product which imho has still a lot to say.