Well if it's okay for the guys as Performancing to write a review, it must be okay for me too.  So Live Writer is out in the wild, I was pinged on Sunday when it came out and announced on Techcrunch.  My first thought, of course, was "uh oh", I'm going to have to try this ASAP.  So I did.

I'll first welcome the Live Writer folks into the blog editor family.  It's a fun group and I think we're all after the same thing, a better experience for bloggers.  So, what do I think.  Pretty much that it's not a completed product.  There are some nice features (like live-ish preview of the post as it would appear on your blog) and copy and paste image handling.  But it reminds me a lot of Qumana v2.  That was a great product and had a lot to offer but Qumana v3 b4 has even moved beyond that benchmark.

Ads by AdGenta.comI think the greater question is, really, how many people are going to try and stick with Live Writer?  Right now you can't easily tag your posts (Qumana can), it doesn't download your previous blog posts pre-Live Writer to open and edit (Qumana does), and the add a blog wizard could be a lot better (I think ours is pretty slick).  Oh and Live Writer doesn't have a build-in way for your to make money from your blog (Qumana, check).  Use a Mac?  Live Writer isn't for you, but Qumana is.  Don't like .NET?  Sorry Live Writer requires it, but Qumana uses Java,

So, which would you choose?

Fred Fabro, our fearless leader and CEO, was quoted in the Seattle PI (also repeated on Newsfactor) about Live Writer:

"The one thing that Microsoft brings is a lot more awareness to the fact that blog editors exist," said Fred Fabro, chief executive of Qumana Software Inc. in Vancouver, B.C., which makes the Qumana desktop blog-authoring program. "Of course, I'm not happy about having Microsoft as a competitor, either."
Well, there it is.

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