I recently spoke to a group of people in my building about the importance of keeping close contact with our customers. “Community” is a buzzword within the walls of Microsoft these days, and I’ve been tagged as the Community Lead in my department. I haven’t quite figured out how I got the position, but I assume it has something to do with my winning personality. Or maybe someone noticed that I have time on my hands.
My talk went over well, and, as instructed, I led into the next speaker, who discussed the fun and excitement of blogging. Microsoft has gone full board into the blogging trend. Any Microsoftee who wants to start a blog can do so with a few clicks on the company intranet. The blog can be internal to company employees or external to everyone else in the world. I did an online search and found five Microsoft people who maintain blogs that focus exclusively on speech technologies. Am I crazy or does that sound like a lot of speech talk? I mean, I work with speech technologies every day and I don’t think I could keep a blog on the subject. And I’m a writer! (In a manner of speaking.) Yet here are five people (non-writers, presumably) who find that there’s so much to say about speech that they want to post something every day to anyone who wants to read it. Curious, I visited each blog and found that only three of the five actually have daily posts. One guy adds to his blog about once a week, and another’s most recent post was in mid-March. To me, that’s not really a blogger. It’s more like a college student who’s having trouble getting started on an assignment.
After my talk, I had lunch with Hench, a computer whiz who has a way of unwittingly but consistently displaying his technical superiority over me.

“Anyone sign up to be a blogger after your talk?” he said.
“Three people. If they make good, that’ll give the company eight speech bloggers. Is the world ready for that?”
“Speech recognition and natural language technologies are huge. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had even more bloggers by the end of the year.”
“I don’t know. People in the company kept telling me that they don’t start blogs because they’re not really allowed to talk about all the cool stuff they’re doing with speech. It’s all under wraps until the next version of the product.”
“I can see their point,” said Hench. “Have you looked at any of the current bloggers?”
“I’ve looked at all five. Only three of them are daily.”
“Anyone I know?
“Do you know Spooner? He’s got one, but his postings are sometimes meager.”
“Meager?”
“Well, like yesterday, his only posting was about the correct way to pronounce ‘Beijing.’ It’s a hard G sound as in ‘major,’ not a soft G as in ‘massage.’”
“I guess it’s hard to come up with new stuff to write about on a daily basis.”
“Tell me about it. Content is one thing - time is another. I don’t know where these people find the time to write a daily blog. Weekly is tough enough. Daily would send me over the edge. I’d have to quit my job.”
“Some people do.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that some people are professional bloggers. They post every day and have a following of loyal readers. They even get sponsors to pay them to advertise on their sites. It’s a real business.”
“Sponsors on a blog? Isn’t there supposed to a bohemian, grass-roots aura that accompanies blogs? Blogs are a haven for Everyman to talk to the world. They’re supposed to be unencumbered with ads and unbeholden to sponsors.”
“Well, one must eat.”
 
Hench is right. After lunch, I checked out a slew of non-Microsoft blogs and found a few that actually have ads posted right up top. Why, you could scarcely tell the difference between the blog page and a magazine column. The horror! And once money is involved, it’s just a matter of time before every blogger out there wants a piece of the pie. Pretty soon, the only bloggers left will be the ones who have sold out to the sponsors. And then the postings will go from daily to three times a week, and finally once a week. And then what will you have? You’ll have a weekly column in an online magazine by some schmo with a computer who has nothing particularly interesting to say about anything.
And who’s going to bother reading that?