News travels fast and in the period January to July, MSN Spaces has had over fifty million hits (if you have your own Space, you're included in that figure), there are twenty million Spaces and the percentage increase in blogging since January has been 950 percent. Watch this space has taken on a whole new meaning!

Those who've already set up their own space know how easy it is - the most difficult part is deciding on a colour scheme! But some spacers wanted more choice to add their own logo, for example, or to show off a Photo Story movie. So the MSN Spaces team have come up with three powertoys to enable you to customise your space over and above what's already possible.

With the TweakUI powertoy you can change the look of your space by changing the background colour of modules, the colours of borders and where the background image is placed.

The Custom HTML powertoy enables you to have a specific module on your space where you can include text or an image (such as a banner to make your space standout).

The Windows Media Player powertoy is the most interesting as it enables your space to play one of your own movies or audios. Note these media have to be your own creation. So, for example, you could put together a collection of your photos in Photo Story and show everybody the movie from your space.

To put the TweakUI powertoy into your space, you need to sign in to your space and up in the address bar of your browser, add "&powertoy=tweakomatic" (without the quotes) to the end of the address that's displayed, and click "Go". Your space will reload and you should now have a new module containing settings for text colours, border colours, and more. At present you need to enter a six-digit number to the colour settings and you can easily find these numbers at sites such as Webreference.

It's a similar procedure to add the Custom HTML toy. After you've loaded your site, add "&powertoy=sandbox" (without the quotes) to your address in the Address box in your browser. Click Go and you'll see a new module to add either your own text or a link to your own banner. To get the Windows Media Player powertoy, add "&powertoy=musicvideo" (once again, without the quotes) and reload your space.

webDotWiz has used these powertoys in his spaces and the only problem you may come up against is that the powertoy is not added to your site at your first attempt. Simply add the specific powertoy text to your space address again and click Go. The webDotWiz Space has the Windows Media Player added and currently it's showing a Photo Story movie made a couple of years ago from a collection of scanned photos. The webDotTrainSim Space has used both the Custom HTML and TweakUI powertoys to change colours and add a banner.

After you've created your own Space, keep an eye on our Local Spaces to see how others are using these powertoys.

Since Virtual Earth runs in a browser, it's web-based nature means anybody can build a webpage that hooks into the Virtual Earth aerial photos and road maps. It's takes less than five minutes to make your own page by following the steps at Via Virtual Earth.

But what tying your space and Virtual Earth together? If you've done some exploring with Virtual Earth, you'll already know that once you've found a landmark, you can blog it to your space for future reference and then add your own text.

There are all sorts of other possibilities, too, such as showing visitors to your space where you took a series of photos. For a demonstration, see the Location Blogger. Click on the "Load from a Space" button and use the author's space (his address, "seanb", is already entered in the space ID box). In a minute or two the scratchpad is filled with thumbnails of his photos. Click the link at the top of each photo alongside its number to locate where the photo was snapped on the Virtual Earth map.

The other feature at Location Blogger is "Blog a place". This enables you to automatically add a portion of the Virtual Earth map to a new blog at your space. You can see an example (not a very good one - webDotWiz didn't line up his map under the cross-hairs) at webDotTrainsim.

Tying together MSN Spaces and Virtual Earth opens all sorts of possibilities for business and government organisations, from store locations to traffic management. For a list of sample sites see the Via Virtual Earth gallery.