We’re always looking for ways to keep our community more interactive and vibrant.  One idea we explored a few months ago was using Live Search QnA.  Thanks to my recent conversation with Mindy (a QnA MVP), I found out we might have even a better reason to use QnA.

The QnA team has recently added support for more conversational exchanges between people.  Before they tried to focus only on informational questions and answers. 

You can read more about these changes on the QnA blog post or on Mindy’s blog post.

Why not give it a try?  And remember to tag your Q’s with clubhouse so they will appear in the lower left corner of this Clubhouse Space. 

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

Last week, we held a Live Meeting event where Jamie Cannon from the Windows Live team joined us to review the new social networking features in Windows Live.  He specifically talked through what’s new in Windows Live Spaces.  The recorded video of the session is below:

Thanks to everyone who joined us, and a special “thank you” to Jamie for presenting.

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

This month’s redesigned Windows Live newsletter features both vasudev and Quikboy:

Since the above graphic is just an image, here are the links:

• Hot for Hotmail
• OK Computer

Congratulations, guys!

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Live Meeting event for the community.  With all the announcements last week it’s a great time for another event!  Since we all have a keen interest in Spaces, how about an overview of what’s new, improved, and coming soon with Spaces?

Joining us will be Jamie Cannon, a Senior Product Manager on the Windows Live team.  He’ll be letting us know about all the cool new stuff we will see in Spaces as well as how Spaces fits into the larger social networking features of this release of Windows Live.

We’ll be using a combination of Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Windows Live Events for this.  You can find out all the details on this event page.  The event is by invitation only, and we’ll start by inviting people who have friended this Community Space.  If you want to attend, please request an invitation by commenting on this post.

We hope to see you there!  If you can’t make it we will post a recorded on-demand version of this in the near future.

Thanks,

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

Recently, Technogran sent me a private Spaces message with an interesting idea.  She suggested using an optional Windows Live tag as a way to indicate when a particular blog post contained feedback about Windows Live products and services.

I think it’s a great idea and I’d like to give it a try.  So the next time you’re doing a post where you’re providing some feedback, just add a feedback tag.  That way, all the feedback from the whole community will be viewable here: 

http://www.windowslive.com/connect/tag/feedback#1

In fact, if you click on that URL, you’ll see some people were already doing this!  Now that we’re spreading the idea around, we’re looking forward to reading even more of your feedback.

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

OK, the month isn’t exactly that new any more, but we had a few issues to get through in the past week or so, plus yesterday’s announcement to finish.  But now it’s challenge time once again!

This month’s challenge is listed up on the Clubhouse site, and it’s all about getting ready for the holidays.  Please take a look and we look forward to seeing your responses!  We’re trying out a different way to tag the challenge entries this time, so please use Challenge-Holiday as a tag in your posts.  The old way we did it with the colon didn’t seem to work as well.

I look forward to hearing how Windows Live might play a part in planning your festivities, sharing memories, and staying in touch.

Thanks,

- Marcus, Windows Live Community manager

Quite a bit is happening with Windows Live today! 

First, the Windows Live team is formally announcing all the new stuff we’ve been working on and that will be released soon.  You can read more about it on this Windows Live Wire post by Brian Hall. 

Second, and as a way to highlight the today’s announcement, we’ve refreshed www.windowslive.com.  You’ll see the home page now highlights what’s coming soon:

We still have your contributions being displayed throughout the site, but we are taking some time to completely focus the home page on these new innovations.

And third (last but not least!), we’ve restarted pulling in your contributions to the Clubhouse site.  Please take a moment to look at what your fellow community members have been posting lately, rating the posts as you go.  Based on your ratings and the tags within the posts, your tips and stories will continue to be featured in key places on www.windowslive.com. 

Thanks again for being a part of the Windows Live community. 

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

As we mentioned previously, we found some strange behavior in how club points were being allocated in the Clubhouse site.  We’ve now fixed those point totals and how they are accumulated.  Now, we’re focused on restarting bringing your posts into the clubhouse.  We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience! 

Best regards,

- Marcus, Windows Live Community manager

As I mentioned late last week, we uncovered some problems with the way club points are being allocated and are in the process of fixing that.  In order to make the fix, we’ve also temporarily paused gathering clubhouse posts from your blogs and bringing them into the Clubhouse site for reviewing, rating, and eventually routing to www.windowslive.com.

We’re planning to restart everything later this week, most likely on Thursday or Friday.  In the mean time, please continue to tag any posts you do, and they will come in automatically when we restart.

Thanks for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience or confusion.

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager