Burning Bird asked for input on Radio for a review she's writing. I've been struggling to capture my overall response, and although it's not complete i liked some of what i wrote, so here:
What features of Radio 8.0 have you used?
Categories, RSS reading (and posting from there to my weblog), and others.
What features are your favorite?
The private server ('full peer') that i can access from anywhere, and from which (potentially only some!) things get posted to my public site, *and* any group public sites i'm involved in. I am certain that this arrangement is the wave of the future, and would love to have it for my wiki.
Categories
Extensibility through coding -- e.g. i put my other weblog in my Radio weblog's sidebar. If i actually learn some UserTalk i could do, well, anything, although i worry about doing something that UserLand's upgrades might break. But whether or not *i* add anything new, other people are adding new features all the time. This is good and bad, actually
What features are missing or incomplete?
Search!?, discussion, email alerts (they're in the docs but not implemented!)
Have you used any external interface into or out of the product? If so, what and how?
Not sure what you mean by 'external interface' -- i haven't blogged with SMS, if that's the sort of thing you mean.
How was your installation experience? And on what OS?
Piece of cake. MacOS X.
Will you continue to use it? If so, why? If not, why not?
Unsure.
Why? It's out-of-the-box prettier than PikiePikie, it automates Categories now, and UserLand actively supports and develops cool, open standards (RSS, XML-RPC), and shares different pieces of my vision of what i really want than wikis do, e.g. see my first favorite feature above.
Why not?
1) it's missing a lot of what i like in wiki -- e.g. minimal-typing markup...
[http://ourpla.net/ name]
vs.
<a href="http://ourpla.net/">name</a>
''italic'' vs. <i>italic</i> etc.
...easy linking among separate pages on related ideas (stories exist, but are a pain in the butt to link among), easy linking among wikis (e.g. OtherWiki:PageName), reverse link lookups, site-global RecentChanges list, etc.
There's a difficult-to-describe gestalt to wiki that's really beautiful. I worry that even tacking a weblog on it loses some of that, but moving to Radio would lose it completely.
2) license -- i try to support open/free code, and i although i mostly trust Dave to be open anyway, he won't live forever (knock on wood). What then?
3) usefulness of what i learn -- wikis (the ones i find most attractive for other reasons) push me to learn Perl and Python, which are for more widely used than UserTalk.
If you had a weblog before, what software did you use to maintain it?
PikiePikie -- see http://pikie.darktech.org/
What's your technical background?
I was a teenage programmer (really!) in the late 70s/early 80s. Haven't coded significantly since then (a mere power user now :), but i have a pretty good picture of what's possible, and muck about freely with HTML, find things like XML and CSS pretty straightforward when i take the time to look at them, etc.
11:58:59 PM 
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