Ellington

Huge news for iTunes users—an executive at movie house Lion's Gate let slip during a quarterly conference call that they've made a deal with Apple to sell full-length films through the online iTunes Store. They're probably not the only ones—expect to be able to buy movies from iTunes for your iPod—or for playback on your Mac or PC—by the end of the year. One question remains … will those movies burn to DVD?

Windows Live continued its slow rollout of software and services—if you're not familiar with Windows Live, it's a collection of online stuff that's sorta designed to help you turn an MSN account into a Windows-centric version of MySpace. Call it "MySquare." (In fact, there's even a Windows Live Spaces section of the service that is similar to … well, you know.) Head over to http://www.live.com to see the smiling, happy stock photography people photos that could only be brought to you by a bland company as lumbering and middle-of-the-road as Microsoft.

Tell I'm not a fan?

That said, Windows Live is impressive in the number of services it offers, allowing for search, e-mail, messaging (already MSN strengths) combined with what may become one of the larger social networking sites in the world. MySpace is successful in part because it allows social networking for non-nerds. It's possible that the less-techie folks likely to flock to Windows Live for its simplicity might actually end up making it a more interesting place to be, socially.

Of particular note this past week is the release of Windows Live Writer (windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/), available as a free download from Microsoft. (You heard me. Free and Microsoft in the same sentence.) The software makes blogging on the Windows Live service a WYSIWYG experience—you don't have to know much about HTML or Web layout to get images, text, headlines, and so forth plugged in and published on your site.

You do, of course, have to have Windows XP installed, but Live Writer isn't limited to Windows Live, as it also supports posting to Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and other services with published interfaces. Of course, so does BlogDesk for Windows (http://www.blogdesk.org/en/index.htm) and Quamana for Mac or PC (http://www.qumana.com), the latter of which is offered for free to push Q-Ads, a revenue generator that's similar to Google AdServe.

Live Writer makes adding images to your blog entries as simple as drag and drop—in fact, the software actually mimics the design of your blog in its window so that you'll see your title images, blogroll and the same CSS (style sheet) information that your site uses. Live Writer features a spell-checker (quite a concept for some bloggers), it integrates with Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and offers support for extensions written by third parties—of which there are likely to be many.

Todd Stauffer is the publisher of the Jackson Free Press and co-author of three dozen books on the Internet and computing. His latest is "The PowerBook and iBook Field Guide" (Wiley and Sons, 2006) with co-author Dennis Cohen.