Microsoft gets into blog role contest
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Microsoft Corp.&#39;s MSN Internet division late Wednesday debuted a preliminary version of MSN Spaces, designed to bring blogs to the masses.
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Microsoft&#39;s MSN division has launched a test version of a free blogging service aimed at consumers, its first attempt to provide this popular activity for the mass consumer market.
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Jeff Jarvis, whose mind occupies the intersection of mainstream media and the blogging world, perhaps more than any other person, is having a conference in mid-October in NYC to bring together people from both worlds to present constructive ideas for working with each other. Me, my feet are firmly planted in the blogging world, but I've spent a lifetime reading and watching MSM, starting with the NY Times at the kitchen table with my parents and brother, when growing up. Some of my fondest memories as a child were our discussions of the days events, and the Times was our common structure. Everyone in our family read the newspaper, often from cover to cover.  As Jarvis councils us, never mind the mistakes, what can we do to make things work better? And I have a couple of proposals in that direction that I will try to present at the October 11 conference. In all cases, they involve the MSM opening up more to include not only the ideas of blogging, but also the bodies of the bloggers.  1. I've said it many times before, it's worth raising again. Any newspaper or radio or TV station with a good reputation in its community could embrace the fresh ideas of the bloggers in their community by offering free blogs to members of the community, who may be new to blogging. I suggested this to the Times in 2001 -- when a person is quoted in a Times article, a few days after the piece runs, contact them, and ask if they'd like to have a NY Times hosted blog. There would be no control over what appeared on the blog. It would have a nytimes.com domain (something like bullmancuso.nytimes.com). Build an aggregator, something very much like Twitter (which is after all, a river of news, not exactly a new idea, heh) that shows all the new posts from members of the community. Encourage (but don't require) your editorial people to read the blog posts. Let whatever happens happen.  2. Here's a new idea that I haven't proposed before. Open your newsroom to bloggers. Set aside a half-dozen desks for people who blog in your community, people you've gotten to know, and provide them with wifi, a water cooler, your coffee (no matter how bad it is) and chance to work alongside your editorial people and (very important) with each other. It's an incredible thing when bloggers get together in a physical space, the sparks can really fly. Now imagine what could happen if those sparks got flying between the remaining editorial people in a professional news organization and the bloggers. I believe the secret of scaling the news is right there, you just have to open the door and see what comes in.
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Microsoft is working on the Smart Blogroll, a way for bloggers and blog readers to learn more about the information and topics discussed on blogs. Bill Slawski points to a paper by Eric Baumer which defines the Smarter Blogroll: Our approach was to scrape the RSS feeds for all the blogs on a user&#8217;s blogroll, run a [...]
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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Robert Cox wants to bring some professionalism to the blogosphere.
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Hoping to keep more Internet users in its branded universe, Microsoft Corp. has become the latest company to offer blogging to the masses.
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The shortlist for a prize aimed at awarding blogs that become books has been announced.
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MSN Spaces, Microsoft&#39;s new blogging service, accompanies a beta version of MSN Messenger 7.0 and updates to MSN Hotmail. MSN Spaces makes it easier for consumers to create and maintain a personal Web site, says Microsoft.
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The free, hosted MSN Spaces service is Microsoft&#39;s first consumer foray into providing a blogging platform. Spaces will enable MSN members to maintain a blog and control it with some sophisticated features that are not typical of all blogging services.
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Microsoft&#39;s MSN (Quote, Chart) launched a blogging tool that ties in with its home media technology plays. Called MSN Spaces, the beta is part of an update to MSN&#39;s suite of communication services.
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[Technology India]: London, Dec 3 :Software giant Microsoft is now ready to take the plunge into the world of blogging by launching a test service to allow people to publish blogs, or online journals, called MSN Spaces.
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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Blog: New blog site, started by political veterans and bloggers, is trying something new--allowing Net roots activists to help write legislation.
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Microsoft&#39;s entry into the blogging realm with MSN Spaces will cause an exponential growth in popularity for the Web-based communications technology.
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Corporate blogging guidelines come down to respect and responsibility.
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MSN is now offering blogging space through its new MSN Spaces service, making it the third major portal to jump into this area. The first?