I wanted to give everyone an idea for the size of megaphone we are exposing your content to. As of April of this year in the US, Windows Live has over 45 million unique Hotmail users, combine that with approximately 17 million Messenger users and 8 million Spaces users and you have a huge network of people. These people will see the content you create everyday when they are using our services because we will be showing your content right alongside the service they use. If you look at the Hotmail homepage example below you will see a box in the lower left under your folders (it says 'import Yahoo contacts') and a box on the sent mail page (this example says 'no pane no gain'). We use these boxes to bring Windows Live to life through interesting features and offerings for our customers.

We will use a portion of these boxes to show the user generated content you all are creating. Imagine seeing a tip you created about Messenger in the Hotmail box for millions of people to see. Truth be told, Windows Live serves up billions impressions every month in these placements. Image the kind of traffic that exposure will give to your blog.

We will also be featuring the content on WindowsLive.com starting in mid July. WindowsLive.com gets over 2.5 million unique users a month. With the new look of the site our community content will be featured front and center. Below is an example of what a portion of the homepage will look like. The images in the section 'See how people like you are using Windows Live' will be your picture and the message at the right is your content.

Thanks for helping us bring the voice of the customer to other Windows Live users who will love to learn from what you already know.

Best, Marty

Remember those spectacular views you saw on your last vacation? Or all your friends and family at that wedding you just attended? Or how about that ball game you saw recently? This week’s challenge is to show how you’ve captured moments like these with your digital camera, and then used Windows Live to help you organize, edit, and share those photos.

We’re looking for your best tips-and-tricks on how you’ve used Windows Live Photo Gallery to categorize and edit your pictures, especially any tips on touching up your photos or stitching photos together into a panorama. We’d also like to learn how you like to share pictures using Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, or Windows Live Spaces.

Last but not least, if you have any great stories on how Windows Live helped you capture the moment we’d really like to hear those too. I’ve posted a brief video with one of my own stories over on my Windows Live Space.

Don’t forget to tag your challenge responses with Challenge: Photos using the tagging guidelines.

Please keep up the great work you’re doing, and thank you!

- Marcus

Good Tuesday afternoon Community members.  I started this journey of bringing Windows Live to life through our amazingly creative, passionate users almost a year ago this month. It's grown and changed since then into what you see today. And a key part of any great community is the manager, the person steering the boat. I am really excited today to introduce you to Marcus Schmidt, the new Windows Live Community Manager.  Marcus is an expert in all things Windows Live. You can check out his Space here. I'm sure in the coming weeks Marcus will be reaching out to some of you to find out more about your stories. In the mean time if you would like to reach Marcus directly you can send him mail at marcussc@Microsoft.com.

To kick things off Marcus did a great post on how to create blog posts using Community Clips. This should give you some ideas to get started.

Best, Marty

Ok, here’s our first challenge: Create a tip that you wished you’d known about when you were new to Windows Live. That tip could apply to any of the Windows Live products. If you’ve got more than one great tip to share, please do. Just remember to create a separate blog post for each tip. And if you’ve already created tips you’d like to share, then check out my post on how to back-tag them.  (Tag it Challenge: Starters)

All of the great content that you create will be displayed in the Cool Content area, so be sure to check out the how-to tips and stories that your fellow members have developed.

Remember:

• Tag your blog for the Clubhouse. You’ll be blogging on your own Windows Live Spaces. Tagging will allow us to find your Clubhouse posts and share that content with others. (See Tagging Guidelines)
• Be creative -- include screen captures, photos, or videos to help illustrate your points. For more on that, check the How -To Guide.

To get warmed up lets start with what we already know. This Thursday we will be posting our first challenge for you to create some cool new posts. But I know there are lots of us members who have been doing this for awhile and have some great content already created around Windows Live. So as a first exercise please take a look at your previous posts and see what you would like to share with the Windows Live audience. For example, I wrote a post back in January about how to add HTML modules to a Space. This is relevant, good help and how to content that I would like to share with others.  What you will need to do is go back and add tags to these posts according to the tagging guidelines, then send an email to club_house@live.com with a URL link to each of the posts you would like to feature. Once we receive the URL link we will add the link to our cool content file. You can check back to make sure your content is on the list, as well as see what other community folks are linking to to get ideas and inspiration. If you have old stories, we'd love to hear those too.

If the old post was done in Live Writer within the last 20 posts you can go to Live Writer and update the tags and then republish. If the post is older than 20 posts, like mine was, you can open a new window in Live Writer, select the “insert tags” and create a new list of tags using the Windows Live tag provider you created. Then copy and paste that tag list in the old post and repost. You'll see in my example post there are two sets of tags. The first set of Technorati tags you see (gadgets, Yelp, marketing) was from the original post. The second set of tags (Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, Spaces, How-to) was what I just added.

We love all media types, text, vides, photos. So get hunting.