Microsoft's Got Blogging On the Brain
 Mary Jo Foley
Microsoft's been hinting publicly and privately that it's bullish on blogging. For any Rip Van Winkles out there who've slept through the blogging craze, Weblogs (a k a blogs) can be as simple as personal online diaries. But they can be more. A growing number of Microsoft bloggers are using Weblogs as a tool for sharing with a larger community their work-related aspirations and inspirations.
Check Out the Microsoft Watch Microsoft Bloggers Page With one foot in the consumer world, and the other in the business realm, Microsoft seems to be hedging its bets as to how to capitalize on Weblogmania. Look at the growing list of blogging-related projects and references coming out of Redmond lately: See "Blogging's On BillG's Radar Screen"
"Microsoft Tests Blogging Tool Waters With Community Starter Kit" Read More On Microsoft's Blogging Plug-In Then, there are the myriad Microsoft blogging projects that are just under the radar screen. Microsoft's Chris Anderson, a developer working on Longhorn, has spent nights and weekends building a blog tool called BlogX, which a number of .Net enthusiasts already are using for their blogs. Other Microsoft folks are experimenting with related technologies, such as RSS, an XML format for syndication. Microsoft WebData team member Dare Obasanjo built a desktop news aggregator that allows interested parties to read streaming Web-site content and headlines on their desktops. Obasanjo calls his project "RSS Bandit." When/if it launches a full-scale attack on the blogging space, Microsoft will hardly be the only major tech company to do so. As Dave Winer, a fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center, noted on his blog this week, one source inside Netscape has told him that AOLTime Warner has decided that Weblogs are "the next killer app." The source says that AOL has 400 people working on a Weblog component for AOL.
What do you think Microsoft's next blogging move will be? Will Redmond roll out its own blogging component for MSN? Package up some kind of blogging toolkit? Make blogs part of its growing communities effort? Write me at mswatch@ziffdavis.com and let me know what you think. |
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