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For example, a tag using several of the options would look like this:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="300" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="5" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="48.8756271_2.3493838" Pushpin="48.8756271_2.3493838" Culture="fr_FR"]

or:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="400" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="17" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667" Culture="en-GB"]</p>

In order to use this plugin, you’ll need to first create a Bing Maps Key here. For further instructions, check out Kebeck’s post.

“You can create dynamic maps that allow your visitors to pan and zoom, or static maps that don't have those features,” it reads. You can choose from Road maps, Aerial maps, Aerial maps showing the road labels, or a 3D Birdseye map.

To use the plugin, you just add a shortcode to your post like this, for example:

[bingMap location="Buenos Aires, Argentina" zoom="13"]

Or a more complex shortcode using all the available attributes may look like this:

[bingMap location=”Seattle, WA” width=”250” height"=”250” title=”Bing Maps Rocks” type=”dynamic” maptype=”AerialWithLabels” zoom=”15” pp1=”Seattle, WA”]

To use the plugin, you’ll first need a free Bing Maps Key. Then you can download and install the plugin from here.

Originally a Microsoft Research project designed to help those with Alzheimer’s disease, the small camera created by researchers at the Cambridge Lab is worn on a lanyard around the neck and takes photos whenever movement is spotted or a person approaches.

A company called Vicon had licensed the production rights from Microsoft in order to launch the camera as the “Vicon Revue.” And now it’s available for purchase.

According the product’s website, the Revue contains a color VGA resolution sensor (640 x 480 pixels), temperature sensor, light color and intensity sensor, passive infra-red motion detector, multi-axis accelerometer, 3-axis magnetometer (compass), battery and flash memory. And it’s fitted with a fish-eye lens to provide a full 130 degree field of view.

Also, the battery lasts for 24 hours between charges, the website claims.

It can hold a shocking number of images – around 30,000 or 6 days worth of capture.

But will you soon be “life-blogging” your every move with it? Not without a hefty down payment first. The Revue costs $820 prior to shipping and taxes.

Now why would you want to do that considering that Posterous is already one of the easiest platforms to publish to? Well, maybe you want to send the same post to both your traditional blog or website and your Posterous blog at the same time. If you create the post in WLW, that’s possible. You would just write the post once, publish it to one site, then switch blogs to publish it a second time to the other site. Or maybe you just prefer WLW’s interface over anything else (I know I do!).

In order to support Posertous publishing, you’ll need to grab the Writerous plugin from Codeplex. Once installed, you access the new settings via Tools –> Options –> Writerous from WLW’s main menu. Here, you’ll have to provide your Posterous login info and site name (the latter if you maintain more than one Posterous blog). You can also configure your Posterous posts to autopost to Twitter and Facebook, too, by checking the box next to that option.

For more details on how to configure and use the plugin, check out the project’s page here.

Now a company called Vicon has licensed the production rights from Microsoft and plan to launch the camera as the “Vicon Revue.” No longer just for Alzheimer’s patients looking to jog their memory (remarkably, that actually works!), the Revue will soon be marketed to “lifebloggers” who want to document their everyday activity.

The camera has 1 GB of storage which is enough to hold around 30,000 of its geo-tagged low-res images. To see the prototype in action, check out this video here.

I have no idea how they do this, but the Xbox comes across as having a real personality. The blog format is conversational, with your Xbox raving about your excellent game-playing skills. Or lightly ragging on you when it's deserved. The entire thing is automated, too. You don’t have to do a thing.

Here’s what a sample blog post looks like, excerpted from Fshguys’s blog:

Fshguy is awesome! Just plain radical even... I say that because we played some games. Did you know our gamerscore is 123,031? He made some progress on Viva Piñata, and wished it would never end, but it did and that was sad.

Oh, remember the challenge that Fshguy was competing in? Well, it's over. Fshguy didn't manage to get the win... but I guess number 62 is better than number LAST!!... wait... maybe we are last? How many people are in this thing? Can I count? You know, sometimes someone else just has better cheat codes than you do -- I mean, that's the only explanation for a loss in this challenge!!!

What’s even funnier is when the Xbox gets on your case about giving up:

…He opened up Left 4 Dead, KUF: Circle of Doom picking up 1 achievement, and then the lightweight went to bed. Freakin' wuss.

That's just plain hilarious!!

If you want to set up your own Xbox blog, you can do so by signing up here: http://360voice.gamerdna.com.

If you’re already using the older Blog This extension, you should first uninstall it before trying the new one. The extension is still considered experimental, so you’ll need to log with your account info at addons.mozilla.org if you want to try it out.

(Thanks, Brandon, for the tip!)

So What’s New?

Insert Multiple Photos: One of the new features you’ll notice in Live Writer 2009 is the ability to insert multiple photos and Windows Live Photo albums. With this, you can easily insert several photos at one time. Because of Live Writer’s tight integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can also insert the photos and have them sent directly to your Live Photo Gallery upon publishing. Alternately, you can select photos from an existing album to add to your post.

Search Your Drafts: If you keep a lot of unpublished posts handy for when you have blogger’s block, you’ll be glad to know that the new version of WLW has an integrated search feature which lets you search through your old drafts by keyword.

Tag Suggestions: For those of you who tag your posts in your WordPress blogs, the new tag suggestions feature will auto-suggest tags as you begin to type. Now you don’t have to worry about tagging things incorrectly or creating near duplicate tags.

Insert and Publish to YouTube: Video bloggers - if you hadn’t yet discovered this feature before, you’re going to love it. From the Insert –> Video option, you can browse for a file on your computer and have it automatically upload to YouTube or Soapbox upon publishing. How convenient is that?

New Plugins: The version of WLW supports plugins, all of which can be found at the Windows Live Gallery web site. If you haven’t already added these plugins, they are definitely must-haves:

• FLICKR UPLOAD
  Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post.
• DIGG THIS
  Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer.
• TWITTER NOTIFY
  Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

According to the Live Writer team blog post, the complete list of new features in this version includes the following:

• “Instant photo” border treatment
• Insert multiple photos
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Improved blog account setup
• Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Support for bidirectional languages
• Updated look and feel

The Oxite platform supports all the blogging features you would expect including pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, optional comment moderation, gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, and support for the MetaWebLog API. That last bit means that there’s no trouble integrating Oxite with Windows Live Writer, a must-have for any serious blogger.

Oxite is also more than just a simple blogging tool – it’s a true content management system. You don’t have to create blog posts with this platform, you can instead use it to create pages and even child pages. It also easily supports multiple blogs on one site as well as the ability to keep separate sites’ data in one database.

Oxite is currently available as an alpha release and is licensed under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License. To see how Oxite works, check out the Channel 9 video. To play with the source code and help contribute to the project, click here.

Another developer also recently created a similar, but much simpler, Autoreplace plugin which will replace any words you enter into the editor. To install this one, click here and save the file into your plugins folder. For the Search and Replace plugin, this is the download here (.msi file).