WordPress.com is now default blogging platform for Windows Live users

Windows Live are partnering to make WordPress the default blogging platform for Windows Live users after an announcement by Windows Live’s Dharmesh Mehta.

The new partnership effectively kills Windows Live’s native blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, and adds about 7 million blogs to the WordPress platform. Users will have about six months to migrate their blog over to the WordPress platform, Mehta said.

“Windows Spaces users can pack up all their stuff and migrate their blogs over to WordPress, and keep blogging on WordPress.com,” said Automattic CEO Toni Schneider.

Schneider said 8.5 percent of all sites on the Web are already powered by WordPress, adding up to about 26 million currently active blogs and 250 million visitors each month. Windows Live Spaces, by comparison, has about 30 million customers, Mehta said.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta Released!

Microsoft unveiled the beta version of Internet Explorer 9, which the company hopes will allow it to maintain its market-share lead against Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Microsoft claimed in a Sept. 15 presentation in San Francisco that Internet Explorer 9 provides the best performance on the Web, leveraging both HTML5 and Windows 7 to deliver rich content faster.

“The Web is about sites; the browser should be, too. People go to the Web for sites, not the browser; much as you go to your PC for apps, not Windows. Today, Websites are boxed in. The box is the browser,” Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Windows Internet Explorer, explained to the audience during the presentation. “We asked ourselves: how could we put sites at the center of the experience? How can IE make sites shine. Our approach here is to use the whole PC.”