Nearly a month ago, I gave you a heads-up on Gawker Media's plans for a science-fiction-themed blog, to be edited by cultural journalist Annalee Newitz. io9 is live now, and though the site seems to skew much more heavily towards movies and television than literary SF, it's still pretty cool. And they did mark the launch date with ten anticipated reads for 2008, which are now among my anticipated reads for the year, too.

But mostly, right now, I'm digging the wicked cool artwork, like that zeppelin. And the fact that the editors describe their territory not just as science fiction, but as "futurist culture." Over at SF writer John Scalzi's Whatever blog—which, by the way, had 9-million-plus unique visitors in 2007 and thus, after featuring 24 authors in "A Month of Writers," could lay claim to being one of the most prominent SF-culture blogs itself, they're adopting a wait-and-see attitude, but in a generally supportive way. Generally: "The moment you start thinking you're too clever for the room," Scalzi warns, "is the moment we set the hounds on you."