Darren Straight’s Blog

Just came across this Windows Live Promotion site which might be of use for those of you that are from Japan or know Japanese, enjoy!

The Philips VOIP 433 Dual Phone for Windows Live Messenger that I won at the second Windows Live Session last month was delivered today, and I have to agree with what Robert Gale has already said about it in a blog post he made a couple of days ago, that being that it’s really good.

It’s easy to install and ties in very nicely with Windows Live Messenger, all you have to do is plug in the wireless base station into youre PC’s USB port and youre alive and kicking, you can also connect it to a regular telephone line to use as a normal phone which is great.

I went outside in my Garden to see how far it would go and I managed to go all the way to the end of the garden and still have good quality voice. The friends I chatted to on it have all agreed that it’s pretty good and would love to have one.

So thanks Romain for inviting me to the session and thank you Phil for supplying them, I can’t wait until the next session, if I’m invited of course!

Messenger Plus! Live has now been released, shame the servers are having some difficulties to keep up with the amount of people trying to connect though:

According to the MSN Spaces Team Blog, Windows Live Spaces is coming soon with some exciting new stuff including the Friends Explorer a new social networking too integrated with and accessible through Windows Live Messenger, which will enable you and your friends to explore others and create new friendships.

Check out the full Team Blog post here and/or discuss this at MS Discussion.

The Windows Live QnA Beta can’t be to far away now, as the Windows Live QnA Beta Team have sent out the following email to people who signed up to beta test Windows Live QnA:

Thanks for signing up to try the Windows Live™ QnA Beta.

We’ve had a lot of people sign up to try QnA. So please bear with us while we get you set up with QnA, the service that will let you get and give answers based on personal experience. You’ll have the chance to be among the first to try QnA when it’s ready.

In the meantime, check out the QnA blog to keep up on the latest developments:

http://spaces.msn.com/liveqna

Thanks again for your interest in Windows Live QnA Beta.

Best regards,
The Windows Live QnA team

Great news for you music artists and fans out there, the MSN Spaces Live Sessions Artists and Fans competition has now started so you can now go ahead and register for your chance to win some fantastic prizes!

MSN Spaces Live Sessions is the new place to find new breaking music. We have many unsigned artists you can listen to right now. Promote your favourites through your MSN Space and you could win a week in Texas for two with a pass to the legendary South by Southwest music festival, accommodation and spending money! Runners up will win tickets to a UK music festival of their choice.

Get started now by going to: http://www.livesessionsuk.com/

Today the Office Team have released a new copyright licensing add-on tool for Office which helps businesses and individuals to protect their IP in documents. This tool will make it easier for authors using Office to select a Creative Commons license for their creative works.

We have partnered with Creative Commons who are a non-profit org promoting “flexible copyright licenses for creative works”. CC have built upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. The tool lets you choose if you intend to declare the IP “all rights reserved”, “some rights reserved” or “public domain” and inserts the appropriate legalese for you into the document.

The add-in inserts an option called “Creative Commons” in the “File” menu of Office apps. Click that option, and the tool asks simple questions in 2 screens, then affixes a link to appropriate license for your creative work. The link leads to a “human readable” summary (the “Commons Deed”), which links to the “legal code” – a full copyright license.

Add-ins like this help to demonstrate that current copyright law is flexible and can be applied by creators to reflect their choices.

Apparently it dosent work on Office 2007 though!

Via: Office Rocker

If not then you might like to try it, OpenStreetMap is a map project aimed at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. They do this by allowing users to contribute anywhere from the world by editing the world map with an online editing interface.

The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.

So yeah even though it needs improvement on the speed and zoom features why not go ahead and have a go and see what you make of it.

The Windows Live Custom Domains team have now released a new Windows Live Custom Domains release update with the following major highlights:

• New UI (user interface) making it easier than ever to navigate around.
• New feature called Open Membership which will allow you to create e-mail accounts in your domain directly from your website.
• Improved error messages and added contextual Help.
• Increased browser support to include Firefox and the upcoming IE7. And soon Mosaic and Opera (these 2 browsers not officially supported).

Via: Windows Live Custom Domains Blog

The Windows Live Messenger Team has just released a small update for Windows Live Messenger, brining the build version now 8.0.0792.

Download

Update, More languages, thanks to mess.be:

>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - English
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Arabic
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Turkish
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Spanish
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Swedish
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Slovak
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Danish
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Chinese (Simplified)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Russian
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Portuguese (Brazilian)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Portuguese (thanks to Nunx)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Greek (thanks to StefVision)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Hebrew (thanks to StefVision)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Hungarian (thanks to akyyy)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - French (thanks to StefVision)
>> Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0792 - Dutch (thanks to StefVision)