I guess things are going well at the Microsoft TheSpoke and Channel 9 blog projects: Bill Gates has announced that blogging is going to change business.

Reed Stevenson

[from Microsoft's Gates Touts Blogging as Business Tool

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates often takes the stage to talk about the future of software technology, but on Thursday he also told top corporate executives that Weblogs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools.

"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit.

Gates' comments on blogging technology were the most extensive thus far from Microsoft's chief software architect, signaling that the world's largest software company is waking up to the potential of blogging as a potential threat and also as a new business opportunity.

Blogs, short for Weblogs, have been around for several years, serving as online journals for Web-savvy disseminators of information ranging from personal ramblings, product reviews, to social commentary.

The growth in the number of blogs, and those who read them, however, is attracting greater attention from businesses as a means to communicate more directly with their employees, partners and customers.

Bill's history of moving into a growing market sector and grinding, grinding, grinding until achieving dominance is a likely scenario here. I guess we should expect blogging to be a basic aspect of MSN and Office in the near term. I plan to track down some of the bright lights in blogging at Microsoft, and trick them into telling all. I was unsuccessful in getting word one out of the folks at Graw Group, the former Visio execs who set up shop to create a blogging platform targetted to come out around the same time as longhorn (see Former Visio Execs to develop Social Networking for Longhorn), but I really haven't started to dig in here, yet.