I saw this story today in PC Mag. Microsoft is ditching Live Spaces and moving to WordPress as its default platform for Windows Live.
Strangely, the Guardian version of the story seems to suggest Microsoft is giving up on blogging altogether and paints a rather more negative picture.
Even more strangely, this post on ConceivablyTech on the same story seems to suggest that Microsoft is about to take over the company that owns WordPress. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I use WordPress to run this blog, and I host it completely independently on my own web space. However, you can get a free hosted WordPress blog quite easily. In fact, I’ve had quite a few people say that they wish they could set up a blog as well. I try to explain how simple it all is – even the way I’ve done it – but they never seem convinced.
Creating a free blog is as simple as signing up and starting to write!
It doesn’t even have to be with WordPress. There’s blogger, blog.co.uk, and dozens of others. However, I’ve tried several in the past and quite honestly WordPress is the best by a million miles! It’s best if you self-host.
One thing I do notice when I am reading peoples blogs is how fast – or rather, how slow – they are, and what they look like. You get some nasty orange ones and they load really slowly. Navigation is also a bit flaky – at least with WordPress you have thousands of themes to choose from with different navigation schemes attached.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this Microsoft/Wordpress alliance develops – and to see who is right about what is actually happening.