Steve Gillmor: RSS Tipping Point

I like his line at the end: If it's going to be true, it is true.

InfoWorld's Tom Yager: it takes a village.

Discusses new influence of small businesses with bigger vendors like Microsoft and Apple.

I'm suprised that Yager totally missed the new trend of weblogs and even things like Channel9 (not to mention our continued community presence in newsgroups, prior to that on CompuServe). We have 400 employees now blogging. All over the company. You think that conversation isn't changing Microsoft? Isn't changing the discussions we have? It sure is from the executive suites on down to the recruiters offices.

Heck, even Eric Rudder is blogging again (another post yesterday). And, yes, he does write his own blog.

Whoa, cool, the Tablet PC team is now blogging. Arin, now it's time to step up and tell us why the Tablet PC is so cool! Drag the OEM's into the word-of-mouth marketing world. They keep complaining that sales aren't all that great. Did you notice how much traffic we got on Channel9? In the first week? Without spending any money on advertising or marketing or even a PRNewsWire press release? How did that happen? Bloggers talked about it. Here's a question for you, which would you rather have? One article that reaches 100,000 people? Or an article that gets passed around the blogger network? Let's see. If I tell something to two people. And those two people tell two people tomorrow. And those four people tell two people the day after that. And those 16 people tell two people the day after that. By the end of the month you've reached more people than the single article has (and it's far more believable because your friend/family/coworker is the one who told you, rather than some journalist who you don't know). Not saying that journalists aren't important, they are. But there's a whole world out here of word-of-mouth marketing that most businesses are ignoring. I know that I'd far rather have word-of-mouth advertising anyday of the week.

Oh, I see that the Marketing Profs have "10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis." Nice!

Sebastien Lambla wants Channel9 to be two-way syndication. I don't quite understand what he's getting at. Sounds a lot like Feedster to me. Go there, and you can build a "Channel9" query, subscribe to it, and then you'll see everyone who mentions Channel9, whether it's on Channel9 itself (since nearly everything on Channel9 is an RSS feed) or on your own blog, or even in my comment area here, since that's an RSS feed too.

And nothing is stopping you from building your own aggregator. For instance, look at Kunal's "MagicFolder" (AKA OutlookMT) -- that lets me aggregate the feeds I read into a single point (by dragging and dropping NewsGator items into a folder they get automatically posted to my experimental aggregated blog).

There is a downside to this aggregation, though. What about copyright law? That law says that anything I create is mine and I have legal control over it.

But, look at my experimental aggregation blog. I'm pretty sure I'm breaking at least the spirit of the copyright law, if not the letter of the law itself. I'm reposting people's creative works without their permission.

We need a new kind of "fair use" law which will let people like me build new kinds of aggregated services and blogs. How do we go about doing that? Creative Commons?

By the way, I'm cool with anyone reusing my content in whatever way they want (as long as it's on my blog -- if it's over on Channel9 Microsoft owns that content so gotta be more careful with that stuff).

If you're thinking of reusing Channel9 content on your own sites, just ask (by the way, we're answering the email sent to channel9@microsoft.com -- all that email is sent to our entire team). We'll figure out what we can and can't do as we go along.

Everyone's asking me "when's the WinFS interview going to be on Channel9?" Looks like it'll be two to four weeks out. We've got a pile of videos already for Channel9.

The interview, by the way, pretty convincingly shows that WinFS is still here. The interview was with Samuel Druker, development lead, on the WinFS team. I'd rather just let his video speak to what the WinFS team is doing. He's a lot more believable than me.

There will be a lot more to come on this one. At one point we actually just visited the comments areas here and over on Channel9 and he answered all the tough questions (yes, Gentoo, even yours!)

I'm so excited by what I heard. Can't wait to share it.

Like I said, my Tivo is getting unplugged this year and I'm going to get a Windows Media Center PC. Why? Well, my favorite news aggregator, NewsGator, is now on the Media Center. Congrats Greg Reinacker for getting that done.

Hmmm, how can one guy do more cool syndication stuff than entire teams here at Microsoft? Rhetorical question, but with guys like Greg and Kunal building on top of .NET Windows' future is very bright indeed.

Sorry I haven't posted much the past few days. Things are going nuts. My son is here for spring break. My dad and my step-mom took us wine tasting over the weekend in Sonoma. So fun! And Channel9 is taking my creative energy. It's like doing a blog, but with video, and decent forums -- the conversations over there have been keeping us busy around the clock. I love the Wikis people are building. That's awesome.

Anyway, I'll get some posts in, but the next week will be light here. My mom and brother arrive later this week, so will be paying attention to family rather than blogging.