According to my just-arrived daily Google News Alert, Robert and I were both quoted (semi-syndicated, actually) today in the Boston Herald, with regard to our comments on MSN Spaces.

Funny, I didn’t actually think the two of us were at opposite ends of the spectrum, opinion-wise. In fact, I actually tend to agree with Robert, in that I would not use MSN Spaces as my primary blogging tool.

(Not that what I think matters all that much, but hey, it’s an honor to be quoted. And I’m a bit embarrassed – for Robert, that is – that I was quoted in the same breath as Scoble. He deserves better company, really.)

Sidebar: I find it fairly interesting that I am essentially blogging about tools that are used for blogging, then the newspaper quotes me in a story talking about blogging tools, using my blog as a journalistic source, and I am now back on the same blog, posting about the fact that this blog was (in a small way) used as a news source. Blogs as sources. Brain freeze. Ouch.

But I do like MSN spaces, not so much for me as for someone like my mom or a friend who’s maybe not quite so… computerified. It’s great for someone not quite so geeky as me, and who has no real desire to get any nerdier. I run my weblog on dasBlog, a .NET application that I installed, customized and run on my web host. My mom can’t conceptualize that, let alone actually do it.

Uh, sorry Mom – You’re terrific. I just needed a good example.

And it looks like that’s what MSN is thinking about with this product. From the Herald’s story:

"We think what we'll do is attract people who maybe have heard of blogging but never would have gone out and created their own blog," said Brooke Richardson, lead product manager for MSN Communications Services. "What we really focused on was making it easy to set up so newbies could get into the space."

So – for the average entry-level user, MSN Spaces is a pretty darn good thing.

For the record, so are other online hosted services like Blogger. And there’s the community-oriented Livejournal, which is actually where I started blogging back in the day. They’re a Portland-based company and a pretty darn cool group of people.