Craig's MovieBlog: Non-Movie Posting: Web 2.0 Logos and Windows Live Writer

I don't normally do this, but two non-movie things hit the web over the last few days, and I wanted to call them out. If you're not a blogger, feel free to skip this post.

First, I laughed a ton at the Web 2.0 Logo Creator, from which I created the new banner for my blog:

Secondly, I'm writing this post with a new tool, not perfect yet, but infinitely better than the standard editor that TypePad provides - it's called Windows Live Writer, and my friends Tony and Robert have nice things to say about it as well. Here's why I like it, as well as my quibbles so far (which Robert seems to share):

It works with blogs other than Microsoft Live Spaces, including WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger.
No more accidentally navigating away from your page and losing an entire post. Windows Live Writer is a separate application. You have no idea how many times I almost threw myself off my roof because of this.
Not only do you get a much larger space to write your content, but they provide a Web Preview mode, where you can literally see your post on your blog before you publish it - ads, titles, styles, graphics, templates and all. Very cool.
It's much easier to do photo management without doing a ton of HTML work (although you can easily get to the raw HTML if you want it), and they make simple photo effects available (sepia, emboss, etc.) with a click or two, including adding watermarks with any text you want - awesome.
People seem very excited about the ability to insert a map, and while the functionality is cool, I don't see myself doing this very often.

Negative:

The Categories feature is non-usable for me. While it automatically imported all my categories from TypePad, which is great, the problem is that I have hundreds of categories, and their drop down box doesn't scroll, so I can only see the first 25 or so. This means that after every post, I manually have to go into TypePad and add the categories the old way. I'm hoping this gets fixed before they ship (did I mention this was a beta?)

Anyway, two cool toys to play with... and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.