By David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth
10 TECH TRENDS
Why There's No Escaping the Blog
Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore.
from the Jan. 10, 2005 issue
Early in the evening of Dec. 1, Microsoft revealed that it planned to
take over the world of blogs—the five-million-plus web journals that
have exploded on the Internet in the past few years. The company's
weapon would be a new service called MSN Spaces, online software that
allows people to easily create and maintain blogs. It didn't take long
for the blogging world to do what it does best: swarm around a new
piece of information; push, prod, and poke at it; and leave it either
stronger or a bloody mess. The next day, at the widely read Boing Boing
blog, co-editor Xeni Jardin opted to do the latter. She titled her critique of MSN Spaces "7 Dirty Blogs" and
hilariously sent up the fickle censoring filters Microsoft appeared to
have built in. MSN Spaces prohibited her from starting a blog called
Pornography and the Law or another entitled Corporate Whore Chronicles;
yet World of Poop passed, as did the educational Smoking Crack: A
How-To Guide for Teens. Within the first hour of Jardin's post, five
blogs had linked to it, including the site of widely read San Jose
Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor. By the end of the day there were
dozens of blogs pointing readers to "7 Dirty Blogs," a proliferation of
links that over the next few weeks topped 300. There were Italian blogs
and Chinese blogs and blogs in Greek, German, and Portuguese. There
were blogs with names like Tie-Dyed Brain Waves, Stubborn Like a Mule,
and LibertyBlog. Each added its own tweak. "Ooooh, that's what I want:
a blog that doesn't allow me to speak my mind," wrote a blogger called
Kung Pow Pig. The conversation had clearly gotten out of Microsoft's
hands.
Typically Microsoft would have taken the hits and kept powering
forward. That is the Microsoft way. For years such behavior has done
little but make people feel defenseless against the company. But this
time Microsoft deployed one of its most important voices to talk back:
not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, but Robert Scoble.
