And apologies, if necessary, for swiping and publishing your whole post … but we like how you have inferred that Qumana has been specifically designed for writers and bloggers.  Qumana makes it so easy to create and publish a blog post that the last-minute afterthought addition of blogging capability in Word 2007’s Beta 2 may be of only marginal relevance, at best, to many people who blog regularly.

Word to Add Blog Posting Tool

It’s been reported that Word 2007 will include a blog posting tool.

Microsoft Word 2007 will sport the last-minute addition of a blog post authoring tool when the software rolls into Beta 2 in the next week or two, the Office 2007 development team announced Friday.

The feature will be accessible from Word 2007’s File/Publish menu, and will support direct posting of blog entries in Beta 2 to Microsoft’s MSN Spaces and SharePoint 2007, Google’s Blogger.com, and Community Server, a collaboration platform Microsoft uses for its own MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) blogs.

According to Joe Friend, a lead program manager on the Word development team, the blog post tool automatically encodes styles such as boldface into HTML, and after some setup, will auto-upload any images added to the blog.

This would be great for laptop users or even dial-up users (for offline work), but not so much for those who use more professional blog hosting platforms and scripts. I’m much more interested in Qumana, the free desktop blog editor. I have to try that out on my laptop.

Tags: blog+authoring, ease+of+use, versatility, free+download, easy+blogging, Microsoft+Word+2007

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Little by little, chip by chip by chip, away from what we ought to be.

William Arkin’s Early Warning Blog has a profoundly disturbing post today, regarding the seamless nature of electronic surveillance in today’s intelligence agencies, their capabilities — and the fact that the full price that we may pay for the implementation of these policies is not something that has either been thought through or debated. And that long-term cost is enormous. For all of us.

Despite urban legend that NSA surveillance is a news media crusade because the majority of Americans "approve" government surveillance to protect them from terrorists, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that almost two-thirds of Americans are concerned that the monitoring may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.

This is the central question: Are all of these NSA ingestion and digestion programs merely more efficient efforts to apprehend criminals and terrorists in the digital age, or are they the building blocks of a new seamless surveillance culture?

The government’s position is that if you are "innocent," you have nothing to hide. It is a new version of ‘you are either with us or against us.’ Massive monitoring is of course meant to find terrorists; I completely believe that this is not some 1960’s enemies list politically motivated effort. But these post 9/11 programs signal a new and different problem.

People of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent and Muslims are potential terrorists, machine selected as "of interest."

Tags: surveillance, wire-tapping, information+systems, hierarchy, wirearchy

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