PC Magazine promotes Blogging for kiddies
PC Magazine has remarkably given the MSN Spaces blogging service a 4/5 with ludicrous praise including
“Remarkably easy way to maintain your own blog, complete with photos and slide shows. Dovetails nicely with MSN Messenger. It’s free”
Umm…. so is Blogger, but more remarkable is that its highly customisable ;-)
“It’s wonderfully easy to use, and its slick set of editing tools is surprisingly powerful….You can stick with the default template if you like, or customize the look and feel of your page. You can add or delete modules. Modules can be moved from place to place, simply by dragging and dropping. Colorful backgrounds can be added to spruce things up”
Its just like a Thomas the Train Engine train set: there’s lots of track and you can add stations, switches and the occasional decorative tree to the set, and a 2 year old can use it. But it only comes in Blue.
There was no Microsoft advertising present on the PC Magazine pages at the time of visit, but we’d be surprised if the review wasn’t paid for. Author Cade Metz even compares the service to TypePad!
MSN Spaces is blogging for kiddies, plain and simple. Easy to use, yes, but your stuck with standardised templates with little, real customisation options. Only when true customisable templates are introduced (with CSS access) can the service be taken seriously.
You know what they say about curiosity killing the cat?
Well call me a dead cat. Just to see I signed up – my advice? Why bother when there are other free services available.
Major hit point: No cut and paste, meaning if you desire to quote another article you must type word for word.
And just as everything connected to “Uncle Bill” it is IE dependent. The service has a function to customize the look, but only from IE. The buttons that enable the feature won’t display in Firefox. In fact in FireFox you cannot even post a new entry. Yep, you guessed it, the button for posting entries will not display unless you are using IE.
In summary: CRAPOLA
You can reply using Firefox, but first you must delete your cookies. Crazy. So much for what Mike Connelly talks about MSN Spaces in the channel 9 wiki video about testing for compatibility and not using any active X. What bollocks.
Blogging for Kiddies is what it is. I was showing a friend the other day around it and we were browsing the new user blogs and not one of them was over 20. We looked at a lot. Most being 14-17yo.