Windows Live Writer is a free desktop program that makes it easy to publish entries to your Windows Live Space or add entries to other blog systems.

Live Writer works like a word processor and lets you easily insert links, photos, maps, emoticons, events, videos and tags from its own insert pane. Photos can be resized, placed against different backgrounds and positioned inline or to the right or left of the page.

After installing the latest version a few days ago, webDotWiz noticed that the program now loads much more quickly. Categories are ordered alphabetically and can be scrolled through.

The first release had some problems but these are now fixed. Text can be copied and pasted into the title line and Tab/Shift-Tab moves the cursor into and out of the title from the body text. Photos now upload when you're ready to publish your entry and they automatically go into a blog images album on your Live Space as well.

The Windows Live Gallery has a whole section devoted to extensions (they used to be called plugins) for Live Writer. Some of the more notable extensions include Flickr4Writer for those who have photos on Flickr, insert spaces emoticons, insert programming code, and an ink extension for TabletPC users.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer developer team announced on October 7 that Internet Explorer 7 will be released this month.

After becoming available for download, it will be released as part of the monthly automatic update process a few weeks later. Users will be asked whether they want to install but Microsoft is urging valid XP users with Service Pack 2 to accept the installation of Internet Explorer 7 as a critical security update.

The Internet Explorer team is making a final plea to those organisations and businesses that are yet to test their applications and web sites against IE 7 to do so now. Microsoft has had a whole range of documentation and readiness kits since last year and the MSDN Internet Explorer Developer centre has lots of advice and information.

For a tour of IE 7's features, especially its greater emphasis on security, see the Internet Explorer homepage.

In other news, Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail) will be updated over the next few days with new features and an improved interface. In particular more space will be devoted to displaying messages and there'll be a wider range of custom themes.

A simple method to find out when (and what) content has changed on your favourite sites is to look for a Windows Live Alert button and then subscribe.

You can choose to receive alerts to both Live Messenger and email or just one of these - the simplest is to let alerts come to you via Messenger. When you're at your computer, the alert toaster will pop up in the bottom right corner of your screen when the site you've subscribed to makes a change to its content.

If you're not at your computer, you can click the Alerts tab on Messenger the next time you sign in and browse through your alert messages. Then if the topics are of interest, a click on the link will take you to that new content.

Another way to check your alert messages is to sign into the Live Alerts site.

To be alerted of new content here, click the Alerts button in the left pane and sign up.