The 'hot' news the past 24 hours has been the announcement that MSN will be launching a blog service.

MSN is expected to tout MSN Spaces as a direct competitor to blog-creation and hosting tools, such as Blogger, Blog*Spot, LiveJournal and TypePad. Microsoft also will position MSN Spaces as a way to allow users to more easily share photo albums and music lists, too, insiders said.

It will be interesting to see how many users end up utilizing MSN's service. I am sure many anti-MS folks will point out the troubles that MS has had with Hotmail as an indication of the quality of the service.

I would think the initial users would be MSN members who are just learning what a blog is. I might even go so far to say they may not learn the name blog, but refer to it as 'Spaces'. Many of the AOL users I know that utilize AOL's journal, refer to it as a journal, not a blog.

Once it is online I'll sign up for an account and play around with it and post my thoughts.