blogs.msdn.com.
Microsoft has been working on blogging software and over the last year has managed to get one employee after another to blog. Now they have the rep for being pro blogging or whatever. This is so bogus. The problem is most of the people who try it seem to set up a blog because they are told to, make one lone post, like this, then disappear. The big list at the Microsoft site seems to kick off the duds monthly only to replace them with more duds. You’d think you’d find some good inside dope going through these blogs, but there is actually nothing but blather and one-post wonders. The real bloggers who actually post a lot seem circumspect, wisely so. I’m just tired of hearing about Microsoft as the blog capitol. That said if you look elsewhere other than MSDN and find this internal MS “community” portal there seems to be some possibility that real information can be discovered. Click on “more blogs” and look at the search engine too. If you find something interesting let me know. All I can manage to uncover seems to be carefully worded promotional entries or shallow (more than usual) observations and comments. Like the whole thing is a scam. Type “Longhorn delay” into the search engine and you’ll not find one blogger mentioning it. Meanwhile, there is a lot of rah-rah garbage. Like here is a “post” from one of the blogs:
Why are product teams so successful at getting innovations into Microsoft products?
Individuals and teams across Microsoft, often evolving ad hoc informal groups within the product team, also generate innovations, sometimes incorporating research from Microsoft research. The conditions are often favorable for these informal teams to produce a technology prototype that evolves into a product feature of a whole new product.
What crap. This sounds more like a brochure than a blog. Meanwhile, elite blogger and Microsoft watchcat Mary Jo Foley raves about all this saying how prolific these folks are. It’s great! She maintains her own list of this junk.
Guess you missed Raymond Chen’s blog. I met Raymond when I worked there – he is an amazing guy. Can debug assembly in his sleep. I think he’s probably been at MS for 20 years, certainly doesn’t need to get paid or anything – I can only assume he does it because he loves it.
Not only Marketingese, but outright hoaxes. See “BOA” for such. And I doubt Mary Jo is so raving overall after those bloggers tried to game her. –
Booze blamed for MS staff’s ‘foggy’ blogging hoax
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/20/ms_blog_alcohol_culprit/
I haven’t read many Microsoft blogs (I just read Scoble) but I think the percentage of quality MS blogs is probably about the same as it is in the wider blogging world. If you set up a blogging tool and tell your whole company to blog there’s bound to be a lot of junk. I just think it’s great that blogging is catching on in the corporate world.
I just did a search for Linux and came across some obvious FUD. The blogger states that each distro of Linux is separate and distinct from each other and that anything you develop for one will not work on any other.
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/07/07/175655.aspx
The blogger goes on to talk about “Microsoft’s platform stability” and how the computer industry would essentially crumble without it. Yeah right.
That is so obviously ludicrous. Either the person has NEVER used Linux or is outright lying.
I’ve been looking at Wallop, the MSFT blogging tool. It has come out of the Online Lab of the Social Computing Group. http://www.onlinelab.org/
wal·loped, wal·lop·ing, wal·lops
v. tr.
To beat soundly; thrash.
To strike with a hard blow.
To defeat thoroughly.
v. intr.
n.
A hard or severe blow.
The ability to strike a powerful blow: has a punch that delivers a wallop.
To move in a rolling, clumsy manner; waddle.
To boil noisily. Used of a liquid.
Come on, this is just Blogging folks. It makes you wonder about the direction MSFT wants to take Blogging in the future. mywallop.com is a social idea. MSFT is spending R&D dollars on this sort of thing.
The Sapphire project, another bolt of lightning conducted at Microsoft’s Beijing research facility. Future applications could know what info you need (even before you do) and where you’ve been–raising some privacy concerns. They’ve modeled the user experience after way people think and feel, not after the way computer and networks are designed. Gee, what a novel approach. MSFT will know what the user is thinking before they even think it. Maybe my PC can just turn itself on when it thinks I want to use it and write my Blogs based on what I might be thinking, but I don’t know I will be thinking. The future PC will be all designed around what computers can do, not around people. The goal is to have automatic, dynamic grouping by association replace folders as the primary means of organizing. No more folders in Windows, everything on the future Windows PC will know where it should be on your harddrive, even before you know where you want it to be. What if it decides you don’t want the file, will it delete it because it knows you wouldn’t want it anyway?
These people are designing cars that know where you want to go before you do. The cars are designed around what cars can do and not people. Give us a break!
Microsoft Chat (Comic Chat) was released on Internet Explorer v3.0 in 1996-March 2001, and was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander together with the Social Computing Group and comic artist Jim Woodring. In Microsoft Chat, your online conversations are the beginning of an interactive comic strip that unfolds in real time. Comic style balloons display your conversation, and gestures generated by conversation semantics give your character a variety of emotions and movements.
This is what it will all come down to in the end. Your whole life recorded as a comic strip in real time, with your Windows PC having the last laugh. Your PC gives your character emotions. This stuff is warped. It’s just a machine plugged into the damn wall, it isn’t that big of a deal and it can’t think. My PC has decided that I should stop this writing and go wash the truck, so I better go now.
These are some GREAT posts.
Microsoft Comic Chat from the Social Computing Group seemed kind of creepy, but nobody seemed to care that much one way or another. Some people are worried about Google Mail and the creepy factor with it. Now the Social Computing Group has come up with this Walloping tool. How creepy will Wallop be? That is up to the Internet users. I think the porno community will find plenty of uses for Wallop, since this is where the big Internet revenue pool is. Plenty of kids are preyed upon with IM clients, while we don’t hear much about kids falling prey to bloggers. Maybe Wallop will help the creeps preying on kids create new traps. Who knows? Somebody will be Walloping somebody on the Internet. Blogging seems fairly safe as an online family activity. Instant messaging has created some real social problems, especially for children. Let’s hope this whole Walloping social experiment where you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends doesn’t turn into a forum for creepy child predators like instant messaging has. Wallop might create a whole new market for filtering and blocking software to prevent your kids from getting Walloped. The name suggests that bad thing are around the corner! I suspect this whole concept is rooted in corporate group think, instead of some ethical product demand. Microsoft is spending big money researching and developing Wallop, so please tell me what is the market for it. People are Blogging and it isn’t like the Blogging software stinks and the public is complaining about it. It appears that just like Comic Chat, Wallop is being developed for a market that doesn’t even exist and might never develop. The real creepy thing in the end is all the time, cash and energy being devoted to something that nobody may want. Maybe we just don’t know we want Wallop, just like we didn’t know how funny our lives could be without Comic Chat to enlighten the rabble among us. Thank God for the elite software rulers of the virtual universe. Where do you want to Wallop today! Microsoft might be better off sticking with technical issues and operating systems. We have the government and not for profit sector for social engineering and wrecking peoples lives with abandon for the costs. We don’t need corporate help for this sort of thing!
Thank You,