Developer Events

TechEd 2005 – IT Blogging

1 Comment

Microsoft’s Betsy Aoki and Eileen Brown gave an excellent Chalk’n’Talk session that was well attended and enjoyed a moderate amount of interaction. This session was preceeded by Betsy’s session about MS IT Microsoft’s Blogging Engine – Construction and Delivery, blogged about here.

Being a Chalk’n’Talk, slide content was limited and was required merely to spark discussion.

Here are some of the things we discussed, with my notes underneath:

What’s a Blog/Why Blog?

Inside/Outside Reach

Customers talk back
Blogs are a great way for your customer to talk to you – but make sure that you don’t become their personal support specialist!

Remember no “Flogs”
This made me chuckle: the guys over at http://www.falafelsoft.com/ use flogs instead of blogs!

Present yourself as resource and aggregator

How do blogs differ from forums/newsgroups/chats?
I’m not sure if we discussed this to completion, I’ll need to check the audio. However, for me, I blog because:

  1. RSS/Atom feed creation is free.
  2. RSS/Atom provides an easy subscription mechanism for my readers
  3. I can access my blog from anywhere, as TechEd’s wireless connectivity demonstrated
  4. no FTP is required, which means I could blog from behind a firewall
  5. it [the blog] pushes content out
  6. content keywords add Google fodder that promotes ranking and facilitates easier searching
  7. content can be short and focussed
  8. there’s much less noise than nntp

Does blog platform matter: yes and no

Consider small audiences and Steve Ballmer: who do YOU want to reach?
“Leverage the power of the small audience”, Betsy Aoki – good quote: you may only have 20 folks reading your blog, but if they are your 20 best customers…

What to Post

Consider “ego searches,” post longevity

X-casting and alternative delivery mechanisms

Link generosity and becoming a human Aggregator

Corporate credibility
This topic reminded me of this and this.

Fighting comment spam

Gaining readers: promotion/tagging/search discoverability
Eileen noted that a simple spelling mistake in one of her posts resulted in a huge number of hits.

Spiders and Bugs

An audio recording of this session can be found here: http://podcasts.msmobiles.com/?p=73 .

Further information:
IT learns to tune out blogging’s white noise
Blogcasts: Coming soon to a computer near you
Microsoft uses blogs to reach out to IT community

How To Blog And Not Lose Your Job