@Andrew, I don't own a wordpress.com site, but I do have 19 or so manually installed blogs on their own domains. If it's been updated, it's got a snow option. I feel like the option showed up randomly before thanksgiving or so and am hoping it vanishes for 11 months of the year after the 4th.
@vortex, Thanks, we're obviously going to have to use something like that, but I still don't see why this isn't a default behavior for any site creation system. If not default at least as a built in option. Especially blogs which have frequent new content.
Anyway, that's my rant. I guess you guys don't agree that this is an important basic feature for any CMS.