The Blog Business Summit just posted an audio recording of my keynote last month.

Microsoft employee, Martin Taylor, is doing a Q&A interview over at Slashdot.

Mark Jen (the guy who only lasted a few weeks at Google) sent me a note last night saying it's true and he'll reveal all soon. In the meantime, Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo wrote up his opinion (he met Mark last night). I agree with Jeremy (we're working on a blogging policy too).

Really, the policy is: don't piss off your boss. We put a positive spin on it and call it "be smart."

The thing I like about working at Microsoft is that I can talk smack about my boss (I wish he'd give me a reason, though, Lenn is one of the best people I've ever worked for) and I can write about things that I'd like to see Microsoft do in the future. Yes, there are risks.

I was talking with a bunch of people last night at the VSLive/Windows Anywhere conference and I said "being identified with a company in public is like being a gold miner." If you're a gold miner you must use dynamite and other explosives to do your job (getting gold out of granite underground).

But that dynamite can also blow off your hand, or worse.

Reading Mark's blog I can see a variety of mistakes he made. When you start at a new company you need to build a relationship network before you start discussing the company in public. You need to understand what the various forces that have power (and, at every company there are probably people who have more power than you do -- even the CEO has to listen to the board of directors and to other people inside the company) and you have to work carefully and deliberately.

It's not easy writing in public. All it takes is one paragraph to lose credibility, have people laugh at you, get you sued, create a PR firestorm, or get your boss mad at you. Think about that one for a while. Just a few hundred pixels on the screen can dramatically change what people think about you.

Anyway, I'm off to go back to the Windows Anywhere conference. Be careful out there!