MSN Spaces

What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't cover the recent announcement that MSN Spaces has just gone live?

Dave Winer covered it very early, Scoble wrote why he wasn't going to (immediately) switch to it, Channel 9 posted two (1, 2) vids interviewing the MSN team, Chris Anderson created the first MSN Space that I viewed, William Luu was the first Aussie blogger I read that covered it (though Splatt has too, and I'm sure many others will follow!), Chris Pirillo also talked about the event, Jeremy Wright had a few things to say and even Steve Ballmer agrees that "Blogging is huge" (nice that you're on top of things Steve).

In short, every man and his dog is posting about this new enterprise from the software behometh.

And it's a big event. Although Microsoft have been ahead of the curve in encouraging its employers to blog it's taken them a l-o-n-g time to deliver blogging software. And while MSN Spaces doesn't look to be revolutionary, it's certainly a decent one-dot-oh effort. Typically, MS has integrated a number of complementary features into the offerring. Photos can be uploaded and displayed, you can put music lists online (and import lists from Media Player and purchase from MSN music by clicking on the generated links), and you can post interesting links. You can even customise the look of the site somewhat - though you don't have a great deal of control.

As I said, nothing revolutionary. There's certainly more powerful and flexible software around. What is really cool is that now the masses will have easy access to blogging. That can only be a good thing.

Naturally, I've created a 'space'...but I won't be moving in a hurry. The only change I'm considering is to host my blog on my own machine...

Anyway, gotta get some sleep so I can get up ridiculously early (6 am! Waaaay too early for normal people!) for Spolsky's NetSeminar.