Blogger for Word - Publish to the Web from Word - As Simple As Google

Now you can use Blogger from within MS Word.

The Google/Blogger team got the idea after they "visited the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in action. Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn't look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation, spelling and grammar are important. That got the Blogger team thinking about how to help Word users to become bloggers."

And this is how the Blogger plug-in for Word was born. Good thinking. It simplifies blogging by bringing it to what the people are used to - their word processor.

Evan Williams, the Blogger founder, writes "to my great surprise and delight, a product that I first thought about five years ago has seen the light of day!

MS Word is a highly sophisticated writing environment, and if I have to write a multi-page document, I still fire it up. What doesn't make sense is that, if you want your words to wind up on the web, you have to trade this writing environment, and the tools you're comfortable with, for a flaky text area.

Blogger for Word is a Microsoft Word plug-in that lets you publish to the web from Word. Not only does it export your text, it actually round-trips, letting you publish to the web, edit, and publish again."

Update 5/14/06:
MS Word 2007 will include blogging tools.
Source: Wikinews; Joe Friend, Blogging from Word 2007.

References:
Word Up - BloggerBuzz.
Blogger for Word! - Evhead.com.
This was posted from Microsoft Word - Google Blog.

Further reading:
The accidental innovator. The Economist, 12/2007.

Updated: 12/23/2007