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Sources inform me that there is such a thing as Windows Live Writer and it is an application that allows you to write documents and also post them to a blog. One or two people appear to have been doing this (as suspected from the Iron Yuppie posting in the past) but little else is know about its features. It seems that Live Writer is in closed beta at the moment although I’ve normally had invites to the closed betas for Live products so far. Perhaps it’s not even reached that stage yet.

Live Writer being a downloadable application (which would align with Ozzie’s vision of web services rather than web applications) means it wont compete head on with Writely, although I imagine it’s going to have the same kind of functionality. Dan at istherefood.com commented to me that he’s used Writely for a little while now to draft out postings before putting them on Wordpress as he likes the way he can share the draft with other people for proof reading and suggestions. No thick client blogging tool has compelled me to date to start using it over the web based interface provided with Wordpress either on Windows or Mac.

I began to think about some things that were evidently ‘missing’ from the July Vista CTP build and started to draw up some connections in my head. There’s no noticeable Messenger client in Vista, you have to download Live Messenger (or any other IM client for that matter) and there’s clearly no client tool for posting to blogs. Writer may be being positioned as a replacement for Word Pad but with blog posting capability. Live Writer, like Microsoft Word 2007, would appear to be able to post to multiple blogging platforms (Live Spaces would be a given and Wordpress would be apparent based upon Inside Live being on WP).

An official announcement is expected on Monday 14th. We await expectantly. It would seem Live Services might not be as ‘paralysed’ as some think.