Darren Neimke

The following link provides a single location for all of the Live Search Olympic background files:

My personal favourite was the Hockey image:

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

The Zemanta plugin for Live Writer looks pretty interesting.  If you haven’t seen or heard of it yet, take a look at the following screencast:

Essentially it makes it much easier to add things such as links, images, and related articles about a topic to your blog articles.

Using techniques such as linking to authoritative articles and posting related information can, in-turn make your own articles more authoritative and a tool such as this one makes doing these things a snap!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Blog smarter - with instant smart links, pictures, tags and more!
• Zemanta Plugin for Windows Live Writer

The image on the right was taken of the updated Windows Live Messenger control for Facebook which was just announced on the Windows Live Messenger Developer blog.  Go and take a read of that post to learn about the improvements that have been made.

I’m glad that they removed the Human Interactive Proof (HIP) requirement from its use as it was definitely a barrier to using it.  My favourite feature though would have to be that you can now allow Live Messenger to update your Facebook status.  Could this be the beginning of a Twitter killer?

The only thing that I could have asked for above this is to have the ability to save conversation histories… oh yeah, in a Mesh folder of course!

The major benefit of these updates is that they improve usability which will hopefully increase acceptance (and therefore adoption) of the Live Platform.  By getting my Facebook contacts familiar with using the Live services will make it easier to collaborate with them using other Live branded applications and services in the future – such as sharing stuff with Live Mesh or collaborating via Office Live Workspaces.

And it’s great that there’s a bridge building between my Facebook community of friends and my Live community of friends too.

Oh yeah, and if you really want to show Live Messenger some love, you can do what over 400K others have done and become a Fan of it on Facebook!

The core benefit is that users can synchronize data between multiple clients.  This core benefit is provided by the basic product Sync Services.

At the next level, the Live Mesh provides a set of services in the cloud and on the client which allow users to synchronize data across multiple clients and to interact with the process via an API.  At this level the product introduces features such as authentication, authorization, and secure transmission of data.  User interface logic allows users to add conversation history to synchronization folders and to resolve synchronization conflicts easily.

At the third level Microsoft have supplied a Live Desktop in the cloud which allows users to manage folders and users and also to connect to and interact with connected clients.

The fourth level will occur soon when the SDK’s for working with Live Mesh are opened up and we can build our own unique user experiences on top of the platform.

Live Mesh is great for storing any documents and files that you need to access from multiple computers and also as a way to ensure that you have your data backed-up.  Currently I’m using Live Mesh to gain both of these benefits when it comes to my OneNote Notebooks.

One of the decisions that you have to make when you use Live Mesh to store your content is how to map the links to physical locations on your hard drive.  I tend to keep all content in its default location and map it from there.  You can still get a single view of what content you have in your Mesh by looking at either the Live Mesh Folders view that gets created on your computer or by viewing your Live Desktop on http://Mesh.com.

One of the adjustments that I do make is to change the location of my ‘Unfiled Notes’ OneNote Notebook.  I do this because the ‘Unfiled Notes’ is actually a .one file which, by default, gets stored in the root of your ‘OneNote Notebooks’ which is located in your Documents folder:

You can’t add individual files directly to your Mesh and so I either have the option of storing all of my OneNote Notebooks (by adding the root folder to Mesh) or changing the default location of the ‘Unfiled Notes’.  And I don’t need to have all of my Notebooks linked to my Live Mesh.  As you can see in the following picture, two Notebooks - ‘Kids Stuff’ and ‘Sharing’ – do not get added as Live Mesh folders.

Changing the default path for your Unfiled Notes Section from the root of your ‘OneNote Notebooks’ folder into its own folder so that you can mesh-enable it is easily done.  You do this by accessing the appropriate dialog from Tools | Options | Save  and then changing the path for the Unfiled Notes Section.