Blogs for the Masses
Just in case, you haven't heard the news - MSN has come out with the Beta of a new and fabulously cool general blogging tool called MSN Spaces. I tried and loved it for a lot of reasons, among them:
- Photos - This makes it so much more personal and effective as a communication medium.
- Drafts - This one feature has to be my favorite - the ability to write a post and save it simply as a draft which is not published. I have lost count of all the files where I have jotted out ideas on which to blog at a later time. Very, very useful (and something that is missing from even popular blogging engines such as .Text, on which the MSDN blogs are being run).
- Look and Feel - Very customizable UI with themes and layout control.
- Access Control - Allows you to make your blog viewable by only certain people. This is so important if people are expected to share their personal lives and stories with family - not everyone wants to share the fact that their dog is not well today with the Whole Wide World.
It has lots of other features as well such as sharing your book lists or music lists etc. - so give it a shot and see if you like it. But keep in mind that this is a BETA, so don't expect the world (I already got one of my accounts locked out and permanently unavailable).
A big Kudos to the MSN Spaces team (who seem to be really busy since the Beta was released). Some of the great blogs I found from the MSN Spaces team members are those of Mike, Dare and Scott.