Not that I doubt the usefulness of such a feature, but I absolutely can't think of a reason why someone would like to have it myself. So, just out of curiosity: Why wouldn't you want to be on the list with a public weblog?

but I don't think I could explain them in english (hard enough in german ;-) one reason could be that you want to use the antville-software for something else as a "weblog". For example: I'm about to create a site using antville as CMS that is from no interest for the "community audience" on twoday.net, I believe. That's way I disabled visibility on the frontpage. Another thing is what hns called "Kleingärtnerverin". The top referrer on my weblog is antville.org. Which means a lot of people visit my site just because it's on antville.org (or just because it's a weblog, who knows) Well, as I said: hard to explain. You get the picture?

My theory so far was this: If your site is nobody's business, it ought to be private, which would take it off the list anyway. But if it's supposed to be public, publicity is a good thing. I suspected there could be reasons why you wouldn't want to have your public site listed, but couldn't think of a good example. I understand your reasoning, but your site doesn't convice me, because there's a lot stuff on Antville that is a lot less interesting ;-) And in a way, the list is a place for stuff that people wouldn't normally click on, it's for browsing around so you can find new stuff you didn't know before. Once you found a blog you really like and intend to visit regularly, you'll subsribe to it anyways; you wouldn't reload the list every 20 minutes and see if it pops up there. However, if there was a very active discussion going on among the members of MVN and constantly keep the site on top of the list although it doesn't concern anyone else, I agree that you might want to cut it out before pissing people off too much :-)

Ad Kleingärtnerverein: Shielding your site from the 'blogging community' may increase the ratio of visitors who came to you, for example, via a targeted Google search, but it surely wouldn't increase their number. What hns criticised is that many people don't get the fact that Antville doesn't end where Elise ends and that consequently all Antville users should be one community instead of being Kleingärtners. Now if you start fencing in your little garden, you're destroying the community even more.

Anyway, I just was curious, thanks for the explanation.

I would prefer that my future weblog will be read only by people who are really interested in it's topic (in my case: about hiv/aids related news) and not only because it's one of the twenty recently updated weblogs on antville. The update notification via subscription list is, in my opinion, absolutely sufficient to track your favorite weblogs. But anyway, I was just wondering if this possibility already exists and I'm thinking that it would be great if the weblog owner could decide for himself if he wants the publicity produced by the antville update list or not.