What about something like wordpress.com? Much more flexibility.

Customization rather than customizability. But close. =D

Thanks for the shout-out, Brandon. My recommendation for someone like you is to avoid Windows Live Spaces. Although it's fine for truly personal blogging, it's not good for people like you and me who are trying to build an online identity. The Spaces interface is cluttered and can't be easily customized, both of which make it difficult to build an identity and get regular readers. Installing Wordpress on your personal domain is easy, or you can go with hosted Wordpress.com. In either case, you'll have a world-class platform that you have complete control over.

I'm tempted to do the same with my own blogs just for convienience and centralisation but I don't fancy manually importing all the old posts and the comments will be lost. That said, I read your blog via rss anyway so it doesn't make any difference to me where the feed comes from. I think it's a good idea.

Why not do both? You could just copy and paste what you do here over to Live Spaces. That way you can maintain and audience of both.

I'm noticing more real bloggers on Live Spaces recently. I mean Live Spaces is nice to blog on, if you don't have too many specifics or like the small community. Like what you guys said, Live Spaces isn't completely customizable, but it's customizable enough for me.

But independent sites like this offer much more customizability, and you don't need a Windows Live ID to leave a comment. Also, it's much easier to search for posts, along with real tagging.

Try and keep both. You don't need to do a URL change for you Space. Just post a link on the right panel of this site.

Thank you all for your feedback.

Quikboy - I am doing both now and it works its just fine but again wanted to try consolidating.

Ed, no problem for the shout out. You're my blogging role model! You bring up a GREAT point and that's online brand. I can easily see moving to Windows Live Spaces as hurting my online brand.

Thanks Chris - that's the word I was looking for!

Well, for me personally, Live Spaces is both a curse and a saviour. Back in 2004, it was so complex trying to find somewhere on the Internet to share my thoughts and opinions. Blogger was there but hard to work with, lack a certain level of simplicity and just did not look inviting in addition being hard to customize. Then MSN Spaces came along. Immediately I was hooked to its straightforward approach, yet its degree of customization and the themes just looked great. For a person like me who doesn't know a lot about managing a website or setting up a webserver or don't have the financial resources for third party hosting, Windows Live Spaces is just perfect.

But at the same time, getting your word out, and attracting readers is very, very hard. Stop blogging for a week and your impressions just disappear into think air. I am trying to restart my blogging efforts again. But Spaces makes it hard to reconnect. Because of school I haven't had the time to invest as much. I am working across multiple computers, so that level of personalization I would be able to add through tools like Windows Live Writer is not there, example, tagging, adding photos, videos, wrapping text and so on. I hope the web interface form improves in the future to support something as simple as tagging because I think it helps a great deal with reaching out to your audience.

The spamming tools need to be improved too, if you check out the majority of of comments on my live space, its mostly from chinese spammers. In addition to that, the search experience is lousy, I can't give my readers the opportunity to search my Live Space in a relevant and natural way (I don't know if this is attributed to the lousy Windows Live Search). I have tried to relay my feedback to the Spaces Team, but sometimes it just falls on deaf airs it seems. I want a Live Space that I can control, that I can use as a tool to extend my voice and make an impact. A live Space where I can find readers with related interest, who actually speak English, so we can have a discussion. Also, I wouldn't mind having integration with a future type Live Groups kinda thing, where I have my own personal group that people can join and we can build a community around. Thats what I want without the complexity.

Me on the other hand am thinking of moving out of Live Spaces so I can have some more customization and hopefully to be taken more seriously. However I do not see wordpress publishing as mobile as Spaces can offer as most of the time I move around (different computer) so that's a problem...