Windows Live team blog archive

I love it when my friends “liveblog” so I get on-the-spot updates from them. What’s liveblogging? It’s sending out updates about what you’re doing, as you’re doing it. Twitter is a popular way to liveblog from anywhere (and you can add Twitter to your Windows Live profile if you like). But it’s also liveblogging when my friend posts photos and comments on their space about the latest sold-out blockbuster or video-game launch while still standing in line. Or when another friend posts videos of their newborn baby to SkyDrive before they even leave the hospital. Whatever and however they publish their news, I can see it as it happens in the What’s new list because I’m in their network on Windows Live. Getting this kind of immediate information lets me feel involved with their lives even when I’m busy with my own hectic schedule and can’t sit down and look at their latest pictures over coffee.

I wanted to liveblog to my friends from Windows Live too. I know it’s crazy, but people want to know what I’ve been up to just as much as I want to know what’s up with them! Go figure! I found out it’s really easy to publish new blog entries on Windows Live with the Spaces e-mail publishing option.

With e-mail publishing, my Windows Live space has a secret e-mail address. When I want to post to my blog, I just compose an e-mail of my blog post, including pictures, and then send it to the secret e-mail address using the e-mail program on my mobile phone!

I’ve also created secret e-mail addresses for my photo albums on Windows Live. With these e-mail addresses set up and turned on, everything I send to the shared photo albums stored on SkyDrive also appears in “What’s new with Sylvia” on my profile, and the people I choose see it in “What’s new with your network.”

Before you hit the road all ready to liveblog too, you’ll need to turn on e-mail publishing for your space:

1. Browse to Windows Live Spaces at http://spaces.live.com and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Click Customize your space, click Options, and then click E-mail publishing.
3. Select the check box for Turn on e-mail publishing.
4. Enter up to three e-mail addresses that you want to use to post to your blog. This is a safeguard to ensure that nobody else can post to your blog, even if your “secret e-mail address” for e-mail publishing falls into the wrong hands. But if you have a work e-mail address and a home address, and you want to be able to post from either one, you can enter both of those e-mail addresses here.
5. Choose a secret word. This is a password, another way to make sure that only you can post to your blog.
6. If you want, you can also choose photo albums to publish to. Each album will have its own e-mail address so you can e-mail photos right to that album from your phone or PC.
7. If you want to review your post before it’s published, under “Select your blog publishing option,” choose Save entries as draft. If you’re feeling lucky, choose Publish entries immediately.
8. Save your changes, and be sure to save these hard-to-remember e-mail addresses to your Hotmail contacts with an easy-to-remember name like My Blog or My Vacation Photos.

Now that you have e-mail publishing turned on, whenever you want to post to your blog, you just write an e-mail, and send it to your space’s secret e-mail address.

If you chose to publish entries immediately, you should see your post right away on your blog and in “What’s new” on your profile page. If you chose to save your entries as drafts, you’ll need to sign in to your space and publish the entries before they’re posted.

Happy liveblogging!

– Sylvia
   Writer, Windows Live team