Huge congratulations to some of my colleagues who have just won recognition from the Computer Weekly Blog Awards.

These are:

• Steve Clayton’s “Geek in Disguise” blog won the “Company Blogs” category
• Jason Langridge’s “Mr Mobile” blog won the “Wireless and Mobile Blogs” category
• Mike Taulty’s “Bits and Bytes” blog won the “Programming and Technical Blogs” category
• Ray Fleming’s “UK Schools” blog won the “Public Sector Blogs” category

Fantastic job. All of these blogs are well worth reading, but a special call out for Steve Clayton who won the Company Blog award - a terrific achievement and well deserved, his blog is an excellent read.

Take a look at http://sirius2.intersoftpt.com/, some nice new Silverlight components.

It's worth viewing the source code if you're a dev, it's incredibly easy to use this stuff.

Looking forward to seeing this being used widely.

I’ve been running with dual monitors for some time and find it’s a really useful way to work, whether you’re writing code or writing a letter. And with monitors getting to reasonable price points these days it has become increasingly common to see this kind of setup.

However, unless you’re prepared to spend time with Photoshop (or free alternative) to hand-craft your own two-monitor-wide background, you’ll be stuck with the same background picture on both monitors.

And that’s just not quite cool enough.

I’ve seen postings that walk you through how to do this on XP, but not on Vista. So I was really pleased to find that Binary Fortress Software provide a little free utility that makes it really easy to do. They offer a pro version for $10 Canadian which is worth a look, if nothing else to show your support.

Download it from http://www.binaryfortress.com/displayfusion.

And if someone knows of another easier way to do this on Vista let me know…but in my opinion this is a great way to get the job done.

Those of you who read my earlier blog post and set your homepage to http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-us will have been enjoying the twice-daily updates of photos from the Olympics as the backdrop.

However Microsoft China decided to go one better and have a full page backdrop of the Birds' Nest stadium on their page (see http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-cn). Very nice.

It's amazing the number of people who have seen the Olympics pictures on my screen and asked "how do I get that?". It's one of those simple little things that's a great idea - credit to the search team.

The Live Mesh team have just opened up the ability for UK residents to sign up to the service. Previously it was only available in the US. In addition to the UK, residents in Australia and New Zealand have also been given the ability to sign up.

Get in quick at www.mesh.com, or read the team's blog post for more info.

This has been in the wings for a while now so it’s good to see it being rolled out. The Live Search homepage (www.live.com) now has a rather pleasing background image – that will be changed over time – with a series of hotspots that you can roll over to explore search information related to the image.

While it’s currently only being rolled out in the US, you can get to see and use it via this link: http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-us (which just changes your location to US on the search page).

It will be interesting to see how this develops, it’s a nice concept.

Read the full story at the live search blog.

This is another of those "in case you haven't seen it" posts....so in case you haven't seen it I would recommend taking a look at http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.

What is it? A number of people who were very skeptical of the value of Windows Vista - but had never used it - were told that they were getting a sneak peak at a brand new operating system from Microsoft called "Mojave". They loved it - they saw how fast it ran, how easy it was to use, how useful it was and gave it a big thumbs up.

They were then told that Windows "Mojave" was in fact Windows Vista. Their reactions are great, here are some of my favourite quotes (remembering that these are people who hate Vista but have never actually used it, and have just found out that the operating system they've been looking at is in fact Windows Vista):

• I need an upgrade and it looks like everything I would need
• I had no idea you could do all this with vista
• Actually it's totally different to what I heard it would be like
• It just seems so easy
• Now I know Vista I like it

And there are plenty more, that's just a sprinkling.

Whatever your opinion this is an interesting experiment in perception versus reality. For us I think it's a good lesson in just how powerful advertising and the Press really can be in setting people's expectations and their perceptions of....well of just about anything.

To me the important thing here is to start challenging many of the so-called truths I have that are based on something I've heard rather than something I've experienced. And I'm not just talking about IT-related issues, I mean anything that I believe, where my opinion is based purely on information provided by someone else.

Maybe I'm just slow in picking this up. But almost everyone has a vested interest and it's worth bearing that in mind whenever you hear or read anything. It cuts both ways of course - I would expect people to apply the same principal to everything we say too.

And you can be sure that includes the things you read in blogs :-)

If you haven't come across our Silverlight Streaming service before now I would recommend taking a look. Why? Here are three reasons to get you started:

1) It's free

1) Allows you to stream high quality video on your website for free

2) There is no branding associated with it ie visitors to your website won't see our branding, just yours. Oh, and it's free.

But even better than it being free, you could now actually get paid when people view your videos. How? If you allow us to display some contextual ads.

We have launched a pilot of the advertising platform which makes this all possible and you can sign up for it (well, actually you can "register your interest" at this time) from here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher/sls

In case you missed it, Chris Pendleton announced in his blog post yesterday we are now providing the full trueSpace 7.6 3D tool as a free download.

This is really cool for a number of reasons, not least because a) trueSpace is a serious 3D tool that has previously retailed at hundreds of dollars and b) because you can upload your creations into Virtual Earth for all to see.

It's interesting to do a few Internet searches for trueSpace to see what it used to cost and how well regarded it is. I've seen version 6 (ie an old version) listed at £569.88 - incredible that you can now get the absolute latest version for nothing.

UPDATE: Looks like some people are having trouble finding the download link, here it is: http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx

You'll need to register, then you'll get some download links for the full product (130MB), the PDF manual (51MB) and a collection of videos (132MB).

It's a question I've come across a few times recently: We provide a number of ways for you to store documents online:

1. Windows Live SkyDrive gives you 5GB of storage for free
2. Office Live Workspace gives you a further 500MB of free storage
3. Live Mesh gives you yet another free 5GB
4. Hotmail gives you...yet another free 5GB

And there may be a few I've missed.

So with all this free storage, what's the best way to use it? Here's my totally unofficial guidance:

1. SkyDrive is a great place for storing finished documents, or documents that are used for reference. It's great for sharing with others but isn't really about collaborating. Generally you can view SkyDrive as a USB drive on the Internet, but that's much easier to share with others
   
2. Office Live Workspace is for collaboration rather than storage. So this is where you can build a document with input from others, allowing them to comment and suggest changes. Once you have finalised the document you should probably move it to SkyDrive and share it that way, freeing up space on your Workspace for the next project.
   
3. Live Mesh is focused on having your files available everywhere you need them, on any device or on the web. It can of course be used to share files with others too, but isn't really about collaboration to the same extent as Office Live Workspace.
   
4. Hotmail is, of course, all about email in terms of storage. I use it to keep copies of emails that are important to me (such as receipts for purchases) that I drag to a folder called "retained documents".

I'm not saying this is the only way, but it works for me. So if you want other people to collaborate with you on a project, Office Live Workspace is your best bet. For pure storage for files that you either need to keep to yourself or share, choose SkyDrive. If you need to have easy access to documents from any device, Mesh is the way to go. And for email storage the ideal option is Hotmail.

Great to see that ask.com has done the right thing and adopted the best mapping solution available on the web. See http://maps.ask.com.

And of course multimap (www.multimap.com) now has VE's bird's eye view images - hardly surprising since we acquired them a while ago. However I have recently overheard a couple of people saying "have you seen the cool new bird's eye view" feature on Multimap?". Not realising of course that this is a feature of Virtual Earth that has been around for a while :-).

Actually I don't care whether they use the feature on http://maps.live.com, on http://maps.ask.com, or www.multimap.com - it's the same feature, as long as they're using it (and aware of it).

Did you know that you can use any email address to sign up for a Windows Live ID? Which means you can use any email address to access Hotmail or Messenger for example, or SkyDrive or Spaces or any other Windows Live Service.

So if I have an existing email address such as ianm@someorotheremailprovider.com then I can use that as my Windows Live ID.

Simply visit this link to sign up using your own email address

Or if you don’t need to use email with your Windows Live ID ie you don’t need access to Hotmail, perhaps because you already have an email service, you can sign up for a limited Windows Live ID. This works just like any other Windows Live ID except you can’t use Hotmail with it. The signup process is somewhat simplified as a result.

Use this link to sign up for a limited account (you’ll get an “@passport.net” account but remember this can’t be used for Hotmail).

If you’ve used the excellent Office Live Workspace you may be aware that there’s a plug-in you can download for the Office client applications (Word, Excel, etc) that allow you to save files to and open files from your Office Live Workspace directly from within the applications.

For example, if you install the plug-in you get some new options in Word for Office Live:

So you can save / open documents in the cloud as easily as if they were stored on your local hard drive.

Now while this is really useful the initial version of the plug-in had some problems in that it was a bit slow to use and tended to request credentials too often.

In order to address this the Office Live Workspace team has just released a new version that makes the whole process a lot slicker, especially if you’re on XP and earlier versions of Office (the Vista / Office 2007 combination was already pretty slick). Read all about it here.

As you may have heard, we released an initial version of a technology known as the worldwide telescope last month. I’ve been playing around with it for a bit and I’ve got to say it’s fascinating stuff. Geek as I am I grew up with Science Fiction, reading Omni magazine, and generally being interested in all things off planet – which means that a product like this is something I can spend hours exploring.

Now, of course there are other products out there that do similar things. I remember discovering Celestia some years ago and finding it a wonderful thing indeed. I bought a copy of Starry Night Backyard, and found even more depth and wonder. Of course I played with Google Sky when it was released as an addition to Google Earth – and had great enjoyment with it. And there are many others too, so for a mad star-struck person like me all of these applications are goodness, and all bring their own special value and sense of wonder.

So what of the Worldwide Telescope? It truly is something special. Here are some of the things I love about it, and I’ve only really started to scrape the surface:

• You can enter your location (ie lat and long) and see the night sky in WWT at any time and date you choose. So I sat at home the other night, looking out of my window at the constellations and could see them mirrored on the WWT screen. I could then right click on any of the stars and get more detail – for example, the little fuzzy patch hanging off Orion’s belt is the Orion nebula, a stellar nursery with young, massive hot stars blowing around cosmic dust, with new stars and new planetary systems being born. Zooming in with WWT allows you to see fantastic detail courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope images
• If you have an appropriate telescope you go one better – hook it up to WWT and it will control the telescope for you so you can look at any object in the night sky as easily as finding it on your screen (I haven’t gone that far yet…)
• The guided tours are wonderful, some of which are narrated. Scientists guide you through the universe, pointing out interesting features via the WWT
• You can view the universe via a number of different methods, not just visible light. So to see the galactic centre of the Milky Way for example it’s best to use longwave radio – and WWT allows you to switch to that. Or infrared. Or microwave. Or X-Ray. Or many others.
• You can view the earth itself in fantastic detail using the aerial photography from Virtual Earth, right in WWT. You can switch to a night view and see population and wealth centres showing up as bright spots of light.

And there is so much more. I have to limit my time in this application because it’s so easy to find hours slipping away.

So if you haven’t explored it yet I very much recommend you take a look. It’s uplifting, fascinating and a really wonderful experience.

I've been trying to compile a list of all of the services that are available (ignoring geographical restrictions) once you have a Windows Live ID. I thought it would be a useful exercise to start listing out the services and see how far I got.

But before I really got started I found a couple of lists that already go some way towards what I'm looking for. For example the good people at Liveside.net have this list of Windows Live Services. And the Wikipedia entry for Live ID lists quite a few too.

But of course a Live ID extends beyond just Windows Live - think of Popfly for example. Then are are MSN services like soapbox, or the country-specific MSN home page eg www.msn.com or www.msn.co.uk both of which provide an increased range of services and information if you sign in with your Live ID.

Or even the customised Live page at my.live.com.

And not forgetting a whole range of external sites that use Live IDs eg Expedia.

It's one of those topics where as soon as you think you have them all, you find some more.

So my challenge is this:

1. Is anyone aware of a list of services that use a Live ID? I don't think this list actually exists but I'm prepared to be proved wrong
2. Can anyone add some additional services that aren't listed either on this blog post, or the Liveside link, or the Wikipedia link?

I realise this is a moving target as new services appear all the time, and keeping track of 3rd party sites is always going to be a challenge, but it feels like a useful list to have. If nothing else, you're almost bound to find something in this list that you didn't know was available.