When my colleague Paul rushed into my office today ranting about how good Live Writer is, I was skeptical to say the least – Microsoft have a checkered history in the field of web authoring software (I’ve still not forgiven them for FrontPage and the havoc it wreaked on a carefully designed intranet security setup).

I went to see what was so exciting and was pleasantly surprised to see a blog editor which didn’t seem to be overloaded with complex features. The Web Layout and Web Preview views were the first major benefit that I could see. It’s nice to be able to see the final formatting as you write and preview the post in the live layout HTML. Paul had already hooked up his WordPress blog and we soon managed to set up the company TypePad Blog too.

So I decided to take the plunge and install it myself. The first thing which impressed me was the ease with which I was able to set up Live Writer to edit this blog. I’m using Blogger but publishing static HTML via FTP to the server, a situation which seems to cause problems for many blog editors but Live Writer breezed through the process without a problem.

Next I was intrigued by the “Add a Plug-in…” button so I went to see what was available. The plug-ins which are already available to Live Writer are pretty impressive such as the Insert Flickr image plugin which allows you to search Flickr for images and insert them without ever leaving the application interface – yes I know Flickr search isn’t exactly revolutionary but it’s a perfect example of something which many of us do when writing a blog post. I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with. Thankfully Microsoft have thought to allow plug-ins to be rated – a handy thing to use if we get Facebook app levels of me-tooism.

So I’m writing this post in my new favourite software (at least for today) who knows, I might even upgrade to Vista one day.