As regards the italics issue, still waiting on that.

As regards the avatars, I'm sorry that I briefly intimated that anything on your site could possibly be related to any feature on any other site ever invented, particularly Twitter or the-social-networking-site-that-dare-not-speak-its-name-here. But my point is that for these avatars to be useful, they have to be so small that you can't see what the picture is. With the exception of yours and perhaps JD's I can't really see what is going on in these pictures, rendering them useless. I like Twitter's convention of being able to click on the photo (from the user info page) and enlarging the picture to full size.

I like and appreciate your small but notable inclusion of some non-text based interface. We'll make a graphic designer out of you yet!