Spend any time cruising around Windows Live Spaces, and you'll see many different examples of how people customize their Spaces with gadgets.  What are some of the coolest ones you've seen or, better yet, implemented on your own Space?

To see the over 2,000 different web gadgets available for Windows Live Spaces, just click here and check out the list on Windows Live Gallery.

As you do your post telling us about your favorite gadgets, please don't forget to follow the tagging guidelines and include Challenge: Gadgets as one of your tags.

- Marcus

This blog is our primary way of staying connected with all of you in the Windows Live community.  As you've seen, we use it to make announcements, talk about our featured members, pose challenges, and -- best of all -- hear back from each of you as you leave comments.

As we move into July, I've been thinking about how to make sure we keep these blog posts useful and fresh, without bombarding all of you with too much.  So here's what I'm thinking for a monthly schedule:

• First Week:  Monthly Challenge -- moving to monthly instead of weekly
• Second Week:  Clubhouse Q&A -- post a comment with some of your top questions and we'll answer them in the comments directly or in subsequent blog posts
• Third Week:  Featured Member -- continue to highlight various community members, monthly instead of weekly
• Fourth Week:  Top Challenge Response(s) -- showcase some of the best things you post in response to the challenge of the first week

In addition to those four key things, I'll definitely keep posting other entries throughout the month as interesting stuff comes up.

What do you think?  With this and everything, I'm interested in your feedback.  Please feel free to leave a comment.

- Marcus

I'm a little off my normal posting schedule this week.  I usually have been highlighting our featured members on Tuesday and doing Weekly Challenges on Thursday but with launch right around the corner I felt I just had to get that Special Challenge out yesterday. 

But this process of doing regular blog posts to the Clubhouse got me thinking that a great person to feature this week would be Jeff.  He's one of the most disciplined bloggers I've seen, and is using Windows Live as a way to meet his goal of writing every day.

You've probably also seen Jeff's comments on a lot of his friend's blog entries including some of the ones here in the Clubhouse.  That's also what makes Jeff a great member of our community -- those comments help encourage us all to write and share more too!

Thanks, Jeff for helping us start a great community!

- Marcus

We're now only about two weeks away from launching the new Windows Live customer community along with the new and improved community clubhouse!  We can hardly wait to share more of the details with you soon. 

I've been absolutely amazed by what many of you have shared already about how you use Windows Live.  All of us who work with these products are grateful to have you as customers and are very thankful you have taken the time to share your experience with others.

With launch right around the corner, there are some special opportunities for how-to tips and stories for products that haven't been posted about much so far.  Specifically if you have anything you want to post about SkyDrive, Family Safety, and/or using Windows Live on your mobile phone, this would be a great time.  You might even have some older posts on these topics that could simply be tagged and re-published.

Please don't forget to tag any responses with Challenge: Countdown along with the other tags outlined in the tagging guidelines so we make sure and highlight your post correctly.

Thanks for helping launch your new community!

- Marcus

I think we would all agree that the internet is an incredibly useful, rewarding and fun thing.  Most of the time.  But we also know that bad stuff can happen.  This week's challenge is about how you protect yourself, your computer, your personal information, and your family.

Maybe you're using some of the security features built into Hotmail or Mail.  You might be using Family Safety to filter websites or control who your kids interact with on-line.  Perhaps you have some other way you guard against potential problems or have a story to share about your own on-line safety/security battles.

Please tag responses to this challenge with Challenge: Safety using the approach outlined in the tagging guidelines.

Thanks and stay safe!

- Marcus

This week's featured member is Greg (a.k.a. Politically Incorrect).  If you've been checking out the cool content list, you'll see Greg has been an amazing contributor to the community!

One of the things that makes Greg so special is his willingness to help his fellow community members as well as his broader set of friends he's met on Windows Live.  He's even gone as far as to recently post a blog entry offering live help (using Windows Live Messenger) to anyone who might need it.

Thanks for helping us build a great community, Greg! 

- Marcus

Wow!  Have you checked out all the great things everyone is posting?  Thanks so much for sharing your stories and tips with your fellow clubhouse members and with us.

With all the posts coming in and with launch just around the corner, it's a great time to recheck the way you're tagging your posts.  Remember, every post needs three required tags:

1. clubhouse so we know it's something you want to share with the community
2. either how-to or story (please don't use both) so we know what type of thing you're sharing
3. and the Product Name(s) (like Writer or Spaces) so we know what your post is highlighting

Thanks again and we're looking forward to launching in the next few weeks and showing off your work to the rest of the world.

- Marcus

How do you balance your work, family, friends, and personal life? 

Please share your stories and how-to tips on what you do to keep up-to-date with appointments, e-mail, and everything else you have going on in your life. 

Have you tried any of the Windows Live for Mobile products?  When you’re on the move, how do you access what you need, when you need it, from wherever you are?  Or when you're at work, how to you keep tabs on your personal life?

One of the things I use to help me is something called Outlook Connector.  I've blogged about it and how it helps me blur the lines between work and home.

Please be sure and use the tagging guidelines in your post and include the Challenge: Balance tag.

Thanks,

Marcus

This week's featured member is Jamie.  He's helped jumpstart the community early with some great posts, and last week responded to our weekly challenge about events with a post about how he's using Windows Live Events as part of his upcoming wedding!  That's quite a testimonial for sure!  We wish him all the best for his upcoming special day.

He's also very willing to give feedback to those of us on the Windows Live and Live Search teams about how we can make our products and services better.

Thank you, Jamie.

With the arrival of summer here in the northern hemisphere (except, it seems, here in the pacific  northwest), Father's Day in the US, and graduation season it seems we all have one event after another on the horizon. 

Those events -- parties, reunions, barbeques, vacations -- can be a lot of fun.  But planning them can sometimes be a bit daunting.  How do you manage everything from sending out invites to organizing who's bringing what to making sure everyone knows where to go?  And how about sharing stories and pictures afterwards?

Please share how you're using Windows Live to make event planning easier and more rewarding for you and your guests.  If you've used Windows Live Events, we definitely would like to hear more about that.  I've posted a little video clip about Windows Live Events up on my blog if you want to learn more about it.

Please don't forget to tag your posts with Challenge: Events along with the other required tags and any optional tags you want to add.

Thanks and hope your summer is off to a great start!

- Marcus

Starting this week, we'll be highlighting some of our clubhouse members that have been particularly active in our community.  Either they have a lot of great posts or maybe they posted one really special thing that uniquely stands out.

Our first featured member is Winston, a consultant from Michigan.  Winston is a member of Microsoft's MVP Program, which stands for Most Valuable Professional.  MVPs are an independent group of experts from all around the world who volunteer to share their expertise with others. 

In Winston's case, he's sharing his in-depth knowledge of e-mail, ranging from Outlook Express to Windows Mail to Hotmail to Windows Live Mail.  He's gone back into his blog and retagged several great posts to share as part of the Windows Live community.  You can see them listed by his name up on our Cool Content page. 

Also, as you can see from his current profile picture (shown here), he's a big Detroit Red Wings hockey fan.  So you know he’s totally happy about the fact they just won the Stanley Cup!

Thank you, Winston, for all your help in building the Windows Live community.  We look forward to featuring more members in the future as we see what people post.  Please keep all those great how-to tips, stories, and challenge responses coming!

- Marcus

As Marty talked about in her post a while back and as I mentioned in my videos about tagging, the posts you're creating and tagging are going to be showcased all across the new Windows Live community web sites. 

To give you a better feel for how this is all going to work and look, I've put together this brief little "sneak peek" video of what you'll see when the full-blown community sites launch soon.

Sneak Peek Video:

We hope you like what you see.  And as always, we welcome your feedback -- please leave a comment below.  The stage is being set for the world to see all your great stuff!

- Marcus

How important is it to you to stay connected to everyone from anywhere at any time?  How do you maintain your "connections?"

This week's challenge is all about how you keep in touch with people.  Please let us know what you do to stay connected and what role Windows Live plays in helping you.  As always, we're looking for everything from how-to tips all the way to stories about how you keep connected.  Please make sure and tag your post with Challenge: Connections using the tagging guidelines.

I've started the ball rolling with a brief post about how I use Windows Live Messenger as my main connection "hub".

Thanks for all your contributions so far!

- Marcus

There have been a few comments and questions about how the tagging approach works for the new Windows Live clubhouse and our overall Windows Live community.  I've put together the brief two part screencast video that hopefully helps explain this a bit more.

Part 1: Overview and Guidelines

Part 2: Using Windows Live Writer for Tagging

Thanks again for all your posts so far.  It's great to see all the interesting and fun things people are doing with Windows Live. 

Happy tagging, and please let us know if you have need any more information about tagging or have any other questions.

- Marcus

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.

Hi. I'm Marty, the acting community manager for the Clubhouse. We want to create a different kind of community together with our most passionate customers. Why? Because that passion is contagious – in a good way. We know you are using Windows Live in creative and inspiring ways everyday. By sharing your experience and creativity, you will inspire others with how you’ve made these products work in your life. People will say: “ I can do that!”  Today, there’s no single place to go to share your overall Windows Live experience. We think this can be that place.

So how will this work? Here in the Clubhouse space is where we’ll communicate with each other. This is what you need to do to get started:

1. Register the URL of the Live Space where you’ll be blogging (remember it has to be public). Send mail to club_house@live.com.
2. Accept the clubhouse as a ‘friend’ and you can get started.

We’ll use the community blog to ask about what you’ve already created or maybe challenge you to create something new. We’re looking for you to show us your best stuff. Maybe it’s a great space – give us a tour. Maybe it’s a tip that you wish you knew when you were first getting started with a Windows Live product. When you’ve got something to share, embed it in your blog and tag it for the clubhouse. You can find the tagging guidelines here.

Ultimately, all of these great tips and examples will be brought into the Clubhouse. That area is still under construction. The best of the best will be showcased on WindowsLive.com. So not only will clubhouse members have a chance to learn from each other, but your work may just inspire a novice user to give it a try!

Along with sharing your best tips and techniques, we want to hear your opinions. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to ask for your thoughts on how to make the community work best for you.

So the Clubhouse is all about sharing. Ready? Our first request is an easy one: Tell us how Windows Live fits in your busy life. How does it help you do what’s important to you? Gut reaction. Are you getting organized? Running events? Sharing memories with family and friends? Staying connected when you’re on the road? There are lots of stories out there. Share yours by commenting below. (And, if you want to show us your space now, just give us the link.)