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Bill and blogs

4 comments on Bill and blogs

Bill and blogs
: Well, Bill Gates embrace of blogs reminds me of his embrace of the Internet, which changed his products, his company, and his industry.

Don’t worry. I’m not about to launch into another spasm of blog triumphalism. Gates wasn’t talking about blogs as blather. He was talking about blogs as tools for personal and business publishing of any kind of information. And he was talking about RSS as a new means of communication and distribution.

This means that, of course, Microsoft will embrace blogs and RSS in its tools, from Word to IE. It also makes Google look smart for buying Blogger (without a strategy then).

Providing publishing tools and space will be an essential service in the near future — for businesses, for family shopping lists, for unlimited sorts of publishing — and the war to win that space is just beginning.

Forget giving me virtually unlimited free email space. Give me virtually unlimited blogspace (and bandwidth).

I’m not sure how this will shake out for companies. It’s easy to argue that blogging toolmakers should consider moving to Maine and opening a B&B (with or without selling to Microsoft) — but then again, as personal and business publishing gets more specialized, there may be opportunities in creating specialized tools. Wouldn’t it be great if the Microsoft Word blogging tool allowed plug-ins? Yeah, it would be great.

Years ago, I worked with a German startup that had a flexible toolset — an Internet platform — to allow developers to create, for example, that shopping-list module (which you could update from the web or mobile devices) and a calendar module and a photo module and so on. Today, the Northwestern students creating a community blog at GoSkokie.com are making me look at these tools in a new way (I just killed two development projects for hyperlocal content and plan to use specialized blog modules instead).

The smart way to look at Gates’ blessing is to think about blogging as a platform for any kind of publishing, communication, and distribution. Bill will.

4 responses to “Bill and blogs”

  1. Steven I. Weiss Avatar
    Steven I. Weiss

    Re: shopping lists, it seems like technology people always come up with new ways to do those. But does anyone really use shopping lists? I almost never do, unless I’m too tired to remember anything.

  2. BigFire Avatar
    BigFire

    Well, here to another round of embrace and enhance from Redwood. Get ready for stuff that almost works according to spect.

  3. Alan Kellogg Avatar
    Alan Kellogg

    Unlimited bandwidth and storage may be closer than you think. I’ve found hosting companies ready to provide as much as 5 gigs of space for less than $20.00 a month. Reseller plans for the most part, but some could be willing to change to a shared hosting plan.
    Sort of blog related are community sites. Where people get together to talk about their favorite subject. Wikipedia’s are sort of like that, only in the form of a perpetual work in progress.
    As the price of harddrive memory goes down and the highspeed infrastructure expands you can expect charges for both to drop. If Bush’s plan to ‘speed wire’ the Internet takes off, expect bandwidth costs to drop drastically.
    Yep, tons of changes coming.

  4. Seth Finkelstein Avatar
    Seth Finkelstein

    If the “RSS Wars” have been bad up to now, just imagine what’s going to happen when Microsoft introduces “MS Channel” or some such. Microsoft does not have a good track record of playing nice with other people’s standards (even if we have two …)