Disruptive Conversations

As I mentioned recently, it seemed like a new version of Windows Live Writer was imminent, and indeed, on Wednesday Microsoft released Windows Live Writer Beta 3 (I would have written about it then, but I was a wee bit distracted). You could download it from that announcement page for from the main Windows Live Writer page.  Reading Joe Cheng's blog post about the release, it sounded interesting so of course I downloaded and installed it.

The first annoyance was that it's now integrated into the full "Windows Live" installer and so when you go to install Windows Live Writer, the installer will also by default install a bunch of other Windows Live apps, ranging from Messenger to Mail to a search Toolbar and a "family safety" option.  Now, you can thankfully de-select all of these options and simply install WLW, but it's something you have to pay attention to.  I understand Microsoft's motivation.  They want to make it easy for people to install all  the Live apps, and they see it as a way to "upsell" people on the other apps (which are all free).  Get people hooked on their apps and search versus those of Google.  I do understand... and I can't really complain because MS is giving us the really incredibly useful Windows Live Writer tool for free.  Still, it was slightly annoying that I had to un-check all those boxes just to get WLW.  (But yes, a small price to pay for WLW.)

The major annoyance, though, was the screen that greeted me when I launched it (once I found it!  My old QuickLaunch icon no longer worked and I had to sort through my Programs menu until I finally found it under the "Windows Live" sub-menu...).  The screen prompted me to start using WLW by adding a weblog! Huh?  What happened to the six weblogs that I already had configured WLW to work with?

Gone.

All the configuration data seems to be gone.  All my weblogs were no longer configured in WLW.  Now, this probably had something to do with the changes to registry locations mentioned in a recent WriterZone blog post.  Still, it was a rather unexpected and definitely annoying outcome of doing what I thought of as an upgrade!  (And yes, I realize it is "Beta 3", but I'm sorry, I would have expected an upgrade to pull across config info.)

Now, the process of adding a weblog is relatively trivial.  Just go to Weblog -> Add Weblog... , fill out the blog URL, username and password, confirm the results and you're done.  Maybe a minute to do it.  Still... it was an unexpected step to have to take.

The good news is that all my drafts still seem intact (even all those drafts for weblogs which are no longer added to WLW), and the couple of plugins I use seem to still be there... so I seem to be set to go.  Now, maybe I can check out the new features...

 Hmmm.... first this note in the Writer Zone on August 29th:

In an upcoming release of Windows Live Writer, we are...

and then Mary Jo Foley writes in ZDNet yesterday "Microsoft to unveil Windows Live suite this week":

The Times is unclear whether Windows Live Writer is in there, too. But it looks like it might be.

pointing to a New York Times article out on Sunday that says this:

The release, though it includes the Windows Live Writer blogging application, carefully avoids cannibalizing two of Microsoft’s mainstays, the Word and Excel programs.

(which would seem to me to be NOT "unclear" about WLW!)

All in all, this would seem to point to an impending release. Perhaps even the "1.0" release??   We'll see....

Here's some humo(u)r to start your week back after the (North American) holiday.  Since I know from comments that a number of my readers are Canadian, I thought I'd just pass along to a link to a piece I posted last Friday:  "How to talk like a Canadian - a 12-step program".   It came about after a fellow podcaster said he wasn't sure about going to a conference in Canada because "his Canadian was rusty".  A number of Canadians actually helped me improve it a bit.  It's posted on my old "North of 45" blog that I used to chronicle our time living in Ottawa from 2000-2005 (north of the 45th parallel).

Enjoy!

If you are looking to get started in "social media" - or are interested in how others survive and thrive in the world of social media - Chris Brogan's post today, "My Social Media Toolkit", may be of great help to you.  I use most all of the tools Chris lists myself, although being on Windows versus a Mac, I use Windows Movie Maker versus iMovie.  I also don't really using Upcoming.org although I've been considering using it more as a way to somewhat automate the list of events that I am attending.  In the comments to Chris' entry, I also added the following sites/services/tools that I use as well:

• del.icio.us - I use http://del.icio.us/ to bookmark and tag all the various sites I find in the course of daily work.  My del.icio.us feed is then a sidebar on a blog, posted to a link blog, etc.
  
• Feedburner - I use http://www.feedburner/ (now owned by Google) for all my RSS feeds, both for the stats and also to add links ("FeedFlare") to the feeds so that people can post my items into other services.
  
• Windows Live Writer - I'll second the comment made (in Chris' comments) by Connie Benson that Windows Live Writer truly ROCKS for an offline blog editor (if you are on Windows).  It has *greatly* increased the ease and speed with which I can post blog entries.
  
• Screen captures - A recent addition to my tool set has been SnagIt from TechSmith. It lets me (on Windows) very quickly grab a section of the screen and copy it to the clipboard - which I can then paste into Windows Live Writer.  It has again greatly accelerated the speed with which I can make blog entries that include graphics, logos, or other parts of a screen. (Here's an example.)  There's also a plugin for Windows Live Writer, although I found that just the copy/paste worked much better/faster for me.  (I'm all about speed for posting, because blogging is something I just fit into random short moments of the day.)

Anyway, those are some of the additions I would make to Chris' great list.  Hopefully this all will help folks use social media that much more effectively.

In recent weeks, it has become increasing clear to me that someone out there is paying people to spam blogs at LiveJournal. As readers probably know, I've had dyork.livejournal.com for about 4 years now and although it's not my primary blog anymore, I still use it for writing that doesn't fit in anywhere else.  I am notified by email when a comment comes in and lately they have pretty much all been short spam messages along the form:

Very exciting story! I like snow skiing and i practise it regularly, so i
completely understand you! <URL-related-to-skiing>

I of course removed the URL as I'm not going to help the spammer.  This particular comment was to a post of mine back in February about the blizzard we had and the only real reference to skiing was the very last line.

This kind of spam has been increasing for me lately with the same basic idea.  A very short comment that is tied into the text of the post.  One spammer even ends the entries with a name, as many other real commenters might do.  In fact, the comments look real, and often are the kind of thing I might very well let stand as a comment.... until you hit the URL and realize that this is just someone trying to sell stuff.

It's an interesting change at LiveJournal.  For so long LJ was "protected" from all the usual crap blog comment spam that plagues all my other blogs by the way commenting works at LJ.  To comment on a blog post, you have to either be a LiveJournal user, or you can leave your comment as "Anonymous".  However, if you leave your comment as "Anonymous", you can't leave a URL associated with your name (as you can do on this blog and most others out there).  This lack of a URL for commenters was actually one of the reasons I chose to leave LJ as my primary blogging platform.  I wanted to know more about the people who commented.

However, this "lack" of a URL turned out to be a great anti-comment-spam feature.  Spammers who were leaving comments with their spam site in the URL field were basically useless on LJ. I'd often laugh because I'd see the same blog comment spam showing up on TypePad (where I could see the URL) as I did on LJ - only on LJ it was ineffective.

It would seem, though, that someone out there figured out a way to make blog comment spam work.  It would appear as if someone is paying people to go around finding quasi-relevant blog entries on LJ and leave comment spam - with an appended URL.   It was probably inevitable... but it's also quite sad.  And it means more work for someone who just wants to write.