A Brief History of Corporate Blogging at Microsoft

With all due respect to the hard working team over in MSDN, then led by Sara Williams, the decision to move Microsoft's zealous bloggers from blogs.gotdotnet.com to weblogs.asp.net was unwise. By the time we made the move in December 2003, there were a few hundred Microsoft blogs. Many of our blogs were heavily visited. My blog alone was seeing somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 unique visitors per day. Weblogs.asp.net was a quiet little community of less than 100 mostly hardcore Microsoft developers. Their blogs were neatly arranged by order of total number of posts, an implicit encouragement to post often. The community had not been around as long as blogs.gotdotnet.com and many Microsoft bloggers had accumulated many more posts than the vast majority of weblogs.asp.net users. Consequently, when we dropped onto their happy little site like a big lead boot, their blogs were suddenly and, I assume, unpleasantly suborned to the bottom of the page. Doh! Prior to the move, I stated my concerns along with a number of other bloggers but I think we must have arrived too late to make a difference.

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