Charles Cooper, on CNET's News.com: "There's a certain something about this particular company [Microsoft] that pushes certain folks over the edge."

Are you looking for great information on Microsoft's products? Now, you might think you should go to Google or MSN's search engine and type in a search there, right? Well, that'll work for a lot of things, but you're missing one of the best information stores: Microsoft's newsgroups.

For instance, let's say your Tablet PC Digitizer isn't working right. If you go to Google you'll find some info, but then go to Microsoft's Community Search engine and search there: you'll find a ton of info.

Pam Sallee, site manager for TechNet, tells me that this search engine just got upgraded. On my first three searches it brought back just what I was looking for.

Amazingly none of the content that gets written in our thousands of newsgroups gets into Google's main search engine. Yeah, you can search "Google Groups" but then you're visiting all newsgroups, not just Microsoft's own.

This gets to why I like blogs better than newsgroups, though. If you add some content to the Web on your blog, your content is in Google's, MSN's, and Yahoo's main engines (which have a lot more traffic than Google Groups -- most people I talk to lately don't even know about newsgroups).

Plus, because search engines algorithms work off of linking behavior, finding the good stuff is sometimes hard on newsgroups.

To all my Indian friends (Anand M, etc) happy independence day!

Leonelson says that Firefox is using the grassroots to get word out about its browser.

I want a OneNote bug. And an Xbox Live bug. And a Longhorn bug.

These kinds of things work: we used them at the PDC last year and sold the conference out. But, they aren't a magical replacement for real marketing. Audiences that read blogs are very small. But they are passionate. So, you'll reach the passionate ones. The influential ones.

But, will you reach mom and dad on blogs and grassroots? Nope. That's why tons of advertisers are spending millions of dollars on the Olympics right now.

The real question is can blogs grow their audiences?

In interests of equal time, I interviewed Dean Hachamovitch, the guy who is running the Internet Explorer team. Another piece of that interview will come up tomorrow.

I love Hugh Macleod's little cartoons that he draws on the back of business cards. Warning: he uses a potentially offensive word or two. His series on creativity is brilliant and now he's pimping a set of cards to help pay for his efforts.

While we're on potentially offensive words (George Carlin style) I see Mark Pilgrim recently got a job at IBM (congrats!) and is starting a corporate blog. How did he inform the world of that fact? Said "a corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don't get to use the word "motherf****r." (The asterisks are my edits).

Personally, I am old school when it comes to George Carlin's famous words. I don't use them unless they are absolutely necessary. Why? Because there are quite a few people out there who will look down on you for using such language. I've met many in my travels. One year when I was helping to plan the VBITS conferences the IT folks from the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City were in the front row. Nice guys, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't support an organization that used George Carlin's famous words on stage.

By the way, a little known fact: you can get fired for what you put on your personal blog just as easily as you can get fired for what you put on your corporate blog -- there really is no difference in my mind.

At NEC I saw an exec get fired for a comment he made on a Web forum. Be careful out there!