Blogs -- a look back as we look ahead

I sat down recently with Chris Anderson, one of the early Microsoft bloggers, credited for creating an early blog solution -- BlogX.  That was back in the day when a *real* blogger would write their own blog solution, according to Chris.

For me, hearing his stories was very enlightening.  Talking about the various aspects of community technology (broadly speaking) from discussion lists, newsgroups, forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, video logs, etc was great.  I wholeheartedly agree that while it's neat to see podcasts and video logs gain traction, they are separate and distinct entities from blogs much like tv news is different than a newspaper or a weekly magazine.  By talking about each of those tech solutions, it's also clear to see that community does not happen in one spot.  It doesn't happen with one solution.  Indeed, additional solutions such as tagspace, or claimspace add other elements to this broader notion of a community involvement in a read/write web.

In addition to talking about technology in general, it was great to hear about the successes of the Microsoft blogging community with getting an internal blog server up and running, as well as having Eric Rudder be an early champion with an external blog.  We also discussed how blogging has changed a bit over the years as people's understanding of and familiarity with blogs evolved.  How all this plays out as more new hires come to Microsoft with deep experiences around blogs remains to be seen.  Not only that, but what happens as the broader community, with a deeper (and perhaps different?) understanding of social technology in general...what happens when they engage with Microsoft?  Needless to say, there's a lot of exciting opportunities ahead :-)

Chris' insight was a welcome perspective check as the team gets closer to a refresh of our blogs beta solution.  When working on a specific project, it's easy to forget the wider context in which it exists.  Blogs at Microsoft -- internal, external, hosted, or built in-house...it's all part of a much larger system that will have a wider impact than any of us could ever imagine. 

Thank you, Chris, for helping to place all of this in context of the larger structure in which blogs (an community technology in general) exists and evolves.

(xposted on my beta blog)