My snapshots from the casual dinner meet-up called by Scott Hanselman with swag by Charlie Owen. Here I play with the thumbnails that Flickr provides, along with the ease of using photos in posts via Live Writer.  I do fancy my Live Writer, yes I do.

[update 2007-09-13: Arun Bhatnagar has put his photo set on Flickr.  They provide a great demonstration of how the Crossroads Mall building is unusually inviting for socialization and informal meetings.] 

I already see that the Live Spaces and Live Writer combination is a wonderful way to easily prepare and post blogs with images, text, and other wonderful things.  The ability to populate modules and to perform other customizations very easily is also commendable.

If I had to choose between a Blogspot-hosted blog and a Live Spaces blog, there is no doubt what I would do and what I recommend to others who are willing to have a blog with content in someone's silo: Live Spaces is more fun and is easier to monkey with. 

My "serious" blogs are hosted on sites that I control and back up, so that the content is in my custody.  Even though I use blogger handling the posts, archiving, and creation of the RSS (Atom) feeds, the final materials are all on server accounts that I have control over.  That has a number of advantages for me and it is the only way I want to place serious content on the Web.

The restriction on involvement here is the same as the one I impose on myself on Facebook: I shall not create any content that I am unwilling to have completely disappear at some point in the future.  The tie-breaker in favor of Live Spaces is that the content is visible on the open web and I don't have to induce anyone to be here too (although having a Windows Live ID may be necessary to interact in certain ways, not much differently than via Blogger).  Of course there is no presence and activity river about my friends and contacts here, although I suspect that may change.  It is one more reason I am sticking around.

Appropriately, my throw-away content is going to be about the Windows Live properties and my experience with those and the related software.

I can make it so easy to incorporate images in my main blogs, I won't be so tempted to spend so much time here.  I shall see how much help LiveWriter can provide.