Related link: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=1&u=/nm/20040520/tc_nm/tec…
Bill Gates is talking about blogs, and I’m wondering what that might mean over the next few years.
Reuters reports Gates as saying:
“What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate.”
Gates is right about that - blogging is certainly easier, for cases where it’s appropriate, than setting up a website in more traditional ways, and the infrastructure built up around various flavors of RSS and Atom make it easy for people to publish once and have automatic distribution to interested parties.
I wonder, though, what form Microsoft’s involvement in the space might take. Having just finished writing a book on Office 2003’s XML capabilities, I know that the parts for making familiar applications talk with weblogs are all there, but it’s still a long way from having a button in Word that “publishes to blog”. (Don Box seems to be working on that problem, and also used InfoPath as a blog editor for a while.
It’s a space worth watching, anyway.
Any thoughts on what an MS blogging system might look like?
Blog as PR Trough
I get the feeling that Gates sees this as just another avenue for spewing corporate-speak.
Although MS has opened the doors for some of it's employees with channel9 I don't see MS having a "Corporate Blog" (as seems indicated) that isn't clogged with bogus items massaged by four different departments, cleared by the marketing department, and just being the ususal PR gunk.
The real point of blogs, I think, is 'voice'. Gates doesn't address that most useful aspect of blogging. Just the transmission.