Doug’s World

Microsoft, Censorship and Blogging

I’m with Scoble on this one: it’s not right for MSN to be an accomplice in censoring bloggers that the Chinese government feels are politically incorrect. Here’s the original article about this breaking story, from Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog this morning.

It will be interesting to see what MSN VP Chris Payne has to say about this (Scoble sent him MacKinnon’s post). This is another test of Microsoft’s commitment to blogging and public accountability in general.

From my perspective, I’m not sure what to make of Microsoft’s blogging stance. When I interviewed at Microsoft last fall, I was told very directly that blogging is the future, and that Microsoft expects people to blog and be part of the global technology community. So I created a blog two days later. I’ve been posting things here ever since, and doing a lot of reading and hacking and experimenting to try to understand blogs and RSS better. I’ve also been reading more and more RSS feeds (up to about 50 now — thanks Kip!), and posting comments on various tech blogs and generally getting my hands dirty in the so-called blogosphere.

But I don’t see much true blogging by Microsoft employees. Sure, Scoble’s always busy, but he’s an individual, not a trend. Steve Sinofsky and Ray Ozzie post some interesting stuff at the senior management level, and there are some great techie blogs from people like Brian Jones and Jensen Harris, but that only accounts for a tiny percentage of the Microsoft blogs I’ve seen. The vast majority seems to be people who started blogging some time between early 2004 and mid-2005, posted a few times, and then stopped. I could list 20 Microsoft blogs that fit that profile, just off the top of my head, but since I’m the new guy I don’t think I’ll needlessly embarrass anyone. Yet.

Is Microsoft’s leadership truly committed to a new level of transparency and accountability, with blogging as a key component of their interaction with the global technology community? I hope so. And I see many signs it’s true, Scoble’s ongoing freedom to speak his mind being the most obvious one. But there are a lot of people at Microsoft still sitting on the fence, not really immersing themselves in the torrent of opinions and criticisms that flow through the most active technology blogs. What are they waiting for?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 10:01 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.