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I just updated with the latest version of Windows Live Messenger – a risk I know – and noticed that bundled within the package was a piece of software called Windows Live Writer.

What this software promised was the ability to publish blog posts directly from one’s desktop.

While I know of several similar programs and pieces of software, this is of particular interest to me as the producer of a great many blog-based websites which rely on user-submitted content: the easier it is to post, the more likely it is that people actually will.

Having just now had a play around with the interface, I can say that initial impressions are very good – Microsoft has switched onto a need in the general populous yet again: that of ‘pain-free’ blogging.

Will it make my life easier if people are kept as far away from the WordPress admin panel as possible? Of course it will – most regular web users who aren’t running their own blogs (i.e. those most likely to use multi-author systems such as ours) tend to freak out a little when met with the admin panel of WP. Yes, 2.7 did allay many of their fears, and simplified things, but really, at the end of the day, most bloggers simply require the visual editor, a list of categories, and a place to put tags.

On several of our sites, we’re now using a form for people (including, often, unregistered users too) to post through. In some cases, we give a checkbox based list of tags too to make people’s lives even easier – lets be honest, given tagging privileges, YouTube shows us people will try to be clever and just choose irrelevant ‘popular’ words (usually sex words) in order to try to get more ‘hits’ etc. They even do this when explicitly asked not to (as on Remix.vg).

In any case, I’m approaching the end of this test post on Windows Writer, and I have to say on first impressions – which are what count with free software (after all, I’d never use it or recommend it otherwise) – this looks to be something I can use. It looks like Microsoft software which will make my life easier (as opposed to Windows Vista, which still wants me to restart in order to install this same software! Doing that will inevitably result in blue screens and system restores, so I’m putting it off manfully, in ten minutes sized chunks).