I know, it sounds silly but hear me out. In March 2006 I wrote a post about the use of Word as a text editor for writing blog posts, because it would be the natural place to do so. At that time Office 2007 was in beta 1 if I remember correctly and Word did not have the functionality to do blog posts at that point. I wrote a mail to Microsoft suggesting that it would be a cool feature to include in Word 2007. They never wrote back.

A couple of months later, Office 2007 beta 2 was released and now Word had the functionality to write blog posts just as I suggested in the email. In the beta 2 it didn’t really work very well, so you could see that it was a last minute feature they had added. If they got the idea from me, then it makes sense that the feature in beta 2 was so bad, because Microsoft didn’t have much time to code it.

So did they steal my idea? Probably not, but the chain of events is a little peculiar I think.

The Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs provide almost all blogs with a common interface for third-parties to hook into. It allows you to use Windows Live Writer to write posts or websites like Digg to do cross-postings.  APIs are fun, because you never know what people will use it for. Just think of the possibilities when you can program against a website.

Al Nyveldt just implemented the MetaWeblog API into BlogEngine.NET and wonders what people will use it for. If you have any cool ideas or want to tell him what cool things you use it for, then visit his latest blog post and tell your story.