Microsoft released Live Writer over the weekend, which is a little Windows word processor that posts what you write to the blog of your choice. I used it on Sunday to post to a Live Spaces bog and it worked fine*, and numerous other poeple are trying it with other systems, so if you are interested, read around....
* Or "Live Spaces blog" -- but the resemblance to MSN Spaces is amusingly apposite.
The download comes with the Live Toolbar which adds things like a feed reader, Onfolio, and your choice of a vast number of buttons (or you can create your own). It also makes IE6 into a tabbed browser. The toolbar obviously has a Blog It button so you can blog stuff via Live Writer while you are surfing, rather than going to your blog.
Nathan Weinberg at InsideMicrosoft has a little walk-through with lots of screen grabs.
For other coverage see TechCrunch, LiveSide, Ed Bott, Om Malik, Dave Winer or whoever floats your boat.
LiveSide has an Exclusive: Interview with J.J. Allaire, Architect for Windows Live Writer Allaire founded Onfolio, which is a great little app that Microsoft bought.
Incidentally. I'm not sure if Live Writer was announced or leaked. Like a lot of Microsoft stuff now, details emerged via the Live Side Team blog. This is neat because it seems to bypass the corporate infrastructure, and most of the teams seem to act on the direct feedback they get. I now have more than 30 Microsoft blogs bookmarked, and Microsoft has turned into a blogging company. It's doing a much better job in this respect than Google or Yahoo, or IBM or Sun, not to mention all the companies that still don't get blogs at all.
Update: I've now uninstalled the Live Toolbar as it's clunky and crashes the browser far too often. That has also removed Onfolio (pity) but left Live Writer behind. IE6 has now stopped crashing. The best way to get tabs on IE is still Maxthon, as an adjunct to Firefox or Opera.
