My initial reaction to the first release of Windows Live Writer (geez, what a name….) was a big yawn. Yes, a nice offline blog-editor, but we already have Ecto, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, w.Bloggar … etc. so unless the new one is significantly better than the existing solutions, why change?
A few smaller glitches aside the showstopper for me was the lack of any support for Technorati tagging. “Bloggers do tags. An editor without tagging is not a Blog Editor. It’s that simple.” Users came to the rescue and he Tag4Writer and Flickr4Writer plug-ins by Tim made Writer a lot more useable; so I gave in and tried it.
Today there is a new release and for the second time in a row I’m seeing that Microsoft actually listens: they’ve added tagging support, fixed a bunch of bugs, and even made startup faster – oh, and now I can insert emoticons 
. I’m starting to like it, and using it now – that is when I’m not posting entirely online, using Zoho Writer.
It’s still not perfect though: Writer failed to download the standard template associated with my blog, so right away there goes the “WYSIWYG in your blog’s style” – about the only differentiator this thingie would have, if only it worked.
Most importantly, although this is now a pretty good editor, the key question from my previous post still stands:
“Why a separate product again? Has it occurred to anyone that blogging is NOT a separate activity from anything else: it’s all about writing content, that ends up published in a particular form. A large part of blogging is reading, note-taking… see where I am heading? Microsoft already has a pretty good (albeit expensive) overall notetaker, OneNote. Why not just blog-enable OneNote and release it free? That would have been a pretty good move.
Of course that still leaves us with a few other Microsoft editors: Word and Wordpad. Here’s where this should be heading: 90% of Word users don’t need the sophisticated features, so let them have a decent, relatively simple editor/notetaker (Writer/Wordpad/OneNote combined) for free, while anyone else who needs fancy editing can buy Word.
Watch my word: the market is heading that direction, whether Microsoft recognizes it or not. And if they don’t, the folks behind Zoho Writer and Writely certainly do.
“Why a separate product again? Has it occurred to anyone that blogging is NOT a separate activity from anything else”
I think you answered your own question. The one main use of such a separate utility, in my case, is to be able to create my blog posts when offline and publish it when online.
However, one feature I’ve requested few of my friends developing these solutions is to provide the ability to auto-sync the posts as and when I go online and I think they are working on it.
That said, I also would like to point out the “Performancing for firefox” extension that integrates nicely into your browser and doesn’t really make you feel that you are doing a separate activity.
“OneNote. Why not just blog-enable OneNote and release it free?”
OneNote, IMHO, targets a different market altogether where organizing/finding/collaborating is of primary concern. It’d be an overkill to use that as a blogging utility.
Startups.in/India
(Nag .B)
Windows Live Writer Tracing Bloggers?
Like I’ve said before, I’m (almost) eating my previous words, and recognize that Windows Live Writer is a pretty good tool. There are two more things I forgot to mention in the previous post: Writer still leaves turd in your blog….
Hi Zoli, have you tried WriteToMyBlog, it’s a free web based blog client.
Thanks, but is we’re talking abut online tools, I’m perfectly happy with Zoho Writer. But there are situations when I need an offline client – like yesterday, having spend 6 hours on a plane…