Like a lot of folks I don't live tethered to the interweb. My family are certainly glad about that. But it sometimes means that when I'm out and about I like to scribble down cogent thoughts that will hopefully one day make it to a post. Many of then fall by the wayside thanks to lost napkins or the randomness of my thought process.

Microsoft have released a beta of the Live Writer tool for bloggers. While heavily optimised towards Live Spaces (hardly surprising) it also supports a bunch of other blogging interfaces as well as an extensible plug-in layer to add cool new functionality (eg 'listening to now' which picks up what's playing in your WMP or iTunes as you write)

It understands the layout / css that you're using on your blog and allows you to preview your post before you commit it. You also have a spell checker and lots of cool off-line tools that you don't get with most online interfaces (though the wonderful world of Ajax is making things better)

Annoyingly it won't let me choose where to install it... it decided that my (already overcramped) C: Drive was the right place to go. Hope they fix that before it is finished

As a tool to use with Community Server it's pretty good, though at the moment I can't get it working on this site (a problem with the metablog API) and, more annoyingly, it doesn't support tags and image upload... but I'm sure CommunityServer will evolve to provide that as well.