Blog What? Part 2

Robert Scoble's blog may be one of Microsoft's most prominent public blogs. Certainly in the shere software development with Microsoft Technology. However, Scoble also fills a role as an evangelist. Are there other less publicized blogs that deal with different subjects? More facts? More new ideas?

Let's start with Dare Obasanjo's WebLog. Just look at his intro posted in February 2004. The full entry is here.

I am a program manager for the WebData XML team. The WebData team is part of the SQL Server Product Unit and produces the major data access technologies that Microsoft produces including MDAC, MSXML, ADO.NET, System.Xml, ObjectSpaces and the WinFS API.

As a technical program manager I am responsible for the nitty gritty of the design of the classes in the following namespaces in the .NET Framework

(Obasanjo, 2004)

Dare's introduction is a little more down-to-earth when compared to Scoble's. Dare cites direct involvement is specific projects. He represents himself as having expertise in a specific sphere. Let's take a look at some of his posts.

This post: found here is highly technical and forward-looking. He's dealing with a product which is not (at the time of this post) even in public beta! Dare is writing about new functionality and presenting facts to a very specific audience. This post represents now only the communication of facts but the fostering of innovation as well. Storing, indexing, and searching well-formed XML in a relational database engine is revolutionary. In this post, Dare has linked to a handful of similar posts or articles in addition to providing his own comments on the subject. This post really exemplifies what I had hoped to see in Microsoft's blogs. The post communicates clear facts about a new technology (fostering innovation) and references a number of other authors thereby helping to build and maintain a sense of community (albeit a relatively small community).

shaykatc's blog is similarly filled with technical information intended for a discrete audience. With his introduction here dated February 2004 we can see that shaykatc also claims specific expertise. Surveying ten posts in the month of April we see eight with titles beginning with the words "VS 2003 Tip". Visual Studio 2003 (VS 2003) is Microsoft's premier development environment. The presence of facts with these "tips" is evident. The tips are not particularly innovative. Mundane is a more applicable term. These posts seem to be intended to help people perform day-to-day tasks in a productive manner. Another quick survey of the comments that follow-up these posts answers our questions about community. Do "tips" help drive an intellectual discourse on the nature of software development? No. Do "tips" build a large following of excited and grateful readers? You bet they do. Of the ten posts, nine had comments. Most of these comments read something like "wow, thannk you so much.".