MicrosoftWatch hosts the following article written by Mary Jo Foley:

With Google buying Blogger creator Pyra Labs over the weekend, many are wondering when and if Microsoft will take a similar plunge into the Weblog-tools world.

It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five "the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit" is a blog builder.

"You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog," confirms Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi.

The Community Starter Kit consists of application code, templates, documentation and forum-based help. According to Microsoft's own definition of the kit: "The Community Starter Kit enables you to quickly create a community Web site such as a user group site, a developer resource site, or a news site." [ read more ]

Food for thought and discussion. What would happen when every MSN/Hotmail user was automatically given the option to opt in for a free weblog (a la LiveJournal)?

Here is an extreme scenario. Having single sign-on in place (.NET Passport), every MSN user could comment on anyone else's blog and have his personal preferences follow him or her as he/she travels from weblog to weblog; a problem the rest of the weblog world has yet to solve. Naturally, their weblogs would seemingly integrate with their IM service/client, and both Internet Explorer and Outlook would get a handy "blog this" feature. Moreover, having billions of MSN users, they could establish de facto technology standards and render existing technologies such as the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API and Trackback almost useless. At every aspect, they would have an immediate technical advantage over established weblog software.