Hey everyone, you may recall last month we wrapped up our reader poll asking what features you’d like to see added to this here blog.

Downloadable high-resolution images, a desktop widget and a subscribe-via-email option were the top 3 requests – and that’s exactly what we’re adding here today. Take a quick peek at the sidebar —–>

Multi-Megabyte Images Await
We have a growing collection of images and artwork from PlayStation games available via Flickr. Each image is available for download at multiple resolutions, most of which scale up to 1280 x 720 and/or 1920 x 1080, and a few that are even bigger than this for you bandwidth gluttons. We’ll be adding new pictures to this collection fairly regularly, so we’ve also created a separate image feed (RSS) that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be notified of updates.

You Love the Blog, Now Get the Widget Too!
We’ve created a PlayStation.Blog widget that lives on your desktop and automatically pulls in all of our latest blog posts. We’ve got two flavors for you guys: one for the Mac, the other for the PC. The Mac widget is your standard OS X Dashboard Widget (download here), and the PC version uses Yahoo! Widgets. Note that you’ll need to first install Yahoo!’s Widget app before you can download and use this PC version.

You Can Never Have Too Much Email
We’ve added an option to subscribe to PlayStation.Blog updates via email (this is in addition to our RSS feed and is provided via the same service, Feedburner). Simply click on the email icon, enter your email address and hit “subscribe.” Once you verify that you’re indeed human and your email works, you’re all set. As we publish new posts here, you’ll automatically receive updates via email.

That’s it for now. It bears mentioning, while info is – and will always be – our priority and focus for you guys here, how you access this info is a matter of preference that can take a lot of different shapes. Hopefully these new features give you a few more options to consider, and at very least, make this blog a little more useful. We’ll be looking into some additional blog bling down the road, most of which involves things you’ve commented or emailed us about, but if you have any additional ideas, let us know. Thanks everyone.

For now, I thought it would be a good time to wrap up our reader poll. After a grand total of 5,028+ votes, it’s fairly clear to us what features you guys would like to see added to this blog. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to concentrate on the top 4 or so features from the recent poll (downloadable high-res images, desktop widget, e-mail updates of new posts, and a ranking feature), then we’ll build things out from there. I should probably also point out that we’ve already implemented (perhaps quietly) the feature you voted for the most – high-res screen shots. Most of the screen shots on this blog have a high-res version available if you click on them and go to our PlayStation.Blog Flickr account. Check it out …

For our next poll, the team here’s interested in hearing your thoughts about the new PSP colors. Specifically, what’s your favorite color? Jump over to the sidebar and cast your vote now!

Over the last few weeks we’ve been receiving and reading a ton of your ideas and thoughts about what sort of features we should be adding to this blog to make it better. We have our own thoughts of course, but given this blog is about you guys and in the spirit of this week’s July 4th holiday, we figured we’ll just put it to a good ol’ fashion vote.

Starting today, on this blog’s sidebar —> vote for the feature(s) you would *most* like to see incorporated here over the next few weeks and we’ll do all that we can to oblige. Also, feel free to leave us suggestions in the comments too — all things will be considered. We know this blog needs some fine tuning, with your help we’ll get it there.