Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week, according to sources close to the company.

MSN is expected to tout MSN Spaces as a direct competitor to blog-creation and hosting tools, such as Blogger, Blog*Spot, LiveJournal and TypePad. Microsoft also will position MSN Spaces as a way to allow users to more easily share photo albums and music lists, too, insiders said.

Some users have been speculating that MSN will allow users to post to their blogs via MSN Messenger 7, the latest version of Microsoft's consumer instant-messaging client, which is in beta now and due to ship in early 2005.

In August, MSN launched a beta version of its blogging tool for the Japanese market only. At that time, MSN officials declined to discuss when and if they planned to broaden the beta to other countries. MSN officials said they considered the MSN Spaces beta as "an incubation project."

"Japan was our chosen market for this service due to usage of mobile data and mobile blogging, but also the high level of customer interest in PC blogging and online communities," said a spokeswoman at that time.

MSN officials did not respond to a request for comment on the company's latest MSN Spaces plans by the time this article was published.

Some industry watchers have said they consider Microsoft's move into blogging as a counteroffensive against MSN archrival Google. In 2003, Google purchased Pyra Labs, the San Francisco-based vendor behind the Blogger blog-authoring platform.

MSN also is beta testing a service called MSN Blogbot, which is a blog-search service. According to sources, MSN is not quite ready to release the final version of MSN Blogbot. MSN Blogbot and its sister product, MSN Newsbot, also in beta, both rely on Moreover Technologies Inc.'s aggregation engines.

MSN Spaces marks Microsoft's first commercial foray into the blogging space. More than 1,000 Microsoft employees currently blog, using a variety of blogging tools. Microsoft has been working to aggregate many of these blogs on its MSDN blog site.

Various Microsoft employees have developed blog-related tools, such as the RSS Bandit news reader and the Blogwave RSS-feed-generation tool. And Microsoft Research has experimented with blogging tools as part of its Wallop" social-networking project.