Catching the wave of "blogging" mania sweeping the online world, the NYTimes.com is now piping news feeds into the burgeoning network of Radio UserLand's 8.0 Web Log management users.

The one-year syndication contract between the digital division of The New York Times and the Millbrae, Calif-based software company would give UserLand's Radio 8.0 content management users fresh NYTimes.com headlines to pipe into their own Weblogs and other blogging networks for that matter.

The feeds from NYTimes.com are to include business and technology news, the arts, international news, national and New York regional news, science, politics, travel and education.

In addition to boosting's Radio UserLand's visibility, the arrangement is sure to add a new dimension to a running bet between the chief executives of the New York Times Digital and UserLand over how huge the Weblogging, or Blogging, phenomenon is expected to be in five years.

Weblogs, or blogs as they're known in the online world, are basically continuously updated sites featuring links to news-oriented topics such as media blog http://www.iwantmedia.com or personal blogs such as http://www.instapundit.com

Although blogs have been around for years, the recent blistering pace of their adoption has captured the imagination of Web hobbyists and online news executives alike.

Blogger.com and its paid self-publishing product BloggerPro list over 375,000 registered users and is said to be adding 1,300 new ones each month. Indeed, during the past weekend the Blogger.com site was unreachable for hours at a time due to heavy traffic.

Given the mushrooming growth of Weblogs, new ribbons of discussion have been flowing into the marketplace of ideas over how big an impact the phenomenon could have on the offline publishing world.

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One of them involves Dave Winer, the CEO and founder of UserLand Software, Inc., who recently entered into a $2,000 wager with the chief executive of the New York Times Digital, Martin Nisenholtz on the predictions and "long-term thinking" Long Bets Web site.

The bet: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

Winer is well-known in the Internet industry for his work in developing Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards for common schema that define the kinds of data, or metadata, that sites send to each other. Radio is his brainchild program that lets less-skilled users take advantage of XML and other blogging techniques without knowledge of FTP, HTML or Web graphics.

On the LongBets site, Winer wrote that the Web, once a province for advanced "scripters" and HTML code writers, is maturing as a medium as more folks take advantage of self-publishing tools.

"This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry, which is employing fewer reporters, editors and writers. But the Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that's the sea-change that the NY Times and other big publications face -- how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the BigPubs won't."

In accepting Winer's wager, Nisenholtz responded that the Web Log phenomenon "does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the OP-ED page for 100 years. In any case, nytimes.com and Weblogs are not mutually exclusive. We would like to extend our ability to act as a host for all sorts-of opinions, and Web Log technology might well be useful in doing so."

"We are pleased to offer Weblog creators the ability to post headlines from NYTimes.com with UserLand's software," said Nisenholtz. "Weblogs are an increasingly popular form of self-publishing within a highly influential community, and are therefore an important distribution channel for our high-quality content."

During an interview with atNewYork sister site WebReference.com, Winer called Radio, which helps users build and then link their sites, an important step in the evolution of the Web as a self-publishing medium. He and his co-workers took what they know about the Web, HTML, browsers and servers, and redistributed the code so more of the work is done on the user's workstation.

"This makes the centralized server much more efficient, and allows more people to write for the Web, which is what UserLand is about."