Why Microsoft is Betting Big on Bloggers and RSS

The opening for day two of the Blog Business Summit is the keynote from Microsoft on IE, RSS and Windows Vista (nee Longhorn). Last night Scoble and Hachamovitch said they were going to be tweaking the original presentation a little given what they'd seen and heard today. My presumption is that this means they're going to take the crowd through what RSS is, why a business should care about it, and how and why Microsoft has decided to devote a good deal of resources to the technology.

The primary question I have is with regard to spam RSS feeds and blogs. From the Gnomedex presentation and Channel 9 video it seemed like Microsoft was going to make it very easy for the user to subscribe to feeds through IE7, much the way it's easy in Firefox and Safari. The spam issues come up when spammers start using pop-up windows to get people to subscribe to spam RSS feeds (and potentially more than one feed at a time). It's the same strategy as the pop-up that offers to scan my hard drive but actually puts malware on it.

And now let's hear from Robert, Dean and Sean Lyndersay.

Dean Hachamovitch starts us off and notes that there are two groups at this conference. The geeks (Pirillo, Scoble, etc.) and the rest of us. The rest of us are wondering how all of this relates to our businesses, and what we're supposed to do with all this information when we get back to the office on Monday. Dean intends to talk to the second group.

When you get back to work on Monday, Dean suggests three things:

1. Start blogging
2. Your blog is step 1 of n
3. Not all the rules are known

Starting to blog is the most important step. The first of many steps en route to having a great connection/engagement with your customers. It's a vehicle to give unvarnished truth to your customers through the blog. Dean says not to worry about some of the details, especially things like RSS, just get going and the rules will come into place over time.

Stepping back, what is the web all about. Originally it was "Browse." Browse was great, but it was hard to find things. But to compliment Browse we added "Search." Search is now huge and an integral part of the web experience. The third step is Subscribe. "Once you subscribe, you never go back. Think about the first time you met a TiVo user, they were frothing at the mouth ... Subscribe is like that ... the information comes to you." There are 3 big things for end users on subscribe:

1. It means automatic delivery .. you don't have to keep going out to find things
2. Notification. No longer have to go check. Save time and cover more ground.
3. Offline. Can leave notebook plugged in and connected and all the information has been collected. (this is mostly a benefit of downloadable RSS readers)

This subscribe feature enables more than just communication with customers, but a more powerful relationship. This is because of not just the technology, but what you can do with it. It allows you to turn your customers into evangelists. As well as give you feedback. There are some business specifics that can be exploited.

Blogs: It's important to think about your blog. Dean uses the example of Edison polling company and the misunderstandings that have cropped up around exit polling in election years, and how the blog could help set the record straight on what exit polls are and what they're not.

Another example of a hypothetical Real Estate agent. Ability to explain in one's own words why the person became an agent. Use agent's own voice to explain their point of view to the customers. Important question is, "this is my business, what should I blog about? What do I want my customers to know about me?" One important feature is "don't lie." Dean faced a lot of opposition to starting the IE blog. What's the upside? Why should we do this? Don't bother. Dean feels a strong responsibility to the customers that use his product. And it's important to state clearly the team's point of view, establish the facts and allow the customers to respond.

That being said, what's the deal with this subscribe business? It's going to become mainstream, "just trust me." (Scoble notes a post on Micropersuaion about the BBC reporting on RSS, "In July, with all the major news events that went with it, the RSS feeds of our news indices delivered 26.7 million click-throughs to the site, a 30% increase on the previous month.") Hands presentation over to Sean.

Sean is showing IE7 running on Vista. Starts with Scoble's blog. Can use button on toolbar to look at feed and use the bookmark button to subscribe just like adding a bookmark. This is pretty well demonstrated on the video at Channel 9 that Robert took in the spring. The video's a bit long, and the demo starts about half way through. A subscription gets added to list of feeds inside of IE. Updated feeds will be bolded in the favorites menu. Feeds will be exposed at a very high level inside the browser.

Dean back. Notion of subscribe is going to be mainstream. It's not just about IE, but Windows and IE enabled and an easy way for people to have and manage subscriptions. When people subscribe they're essentially raising their hand and saying, "I'd like to have a conversation with your company."

Beyond the text of a blog you have something like Podcasting, which is a blog with audio attached. Dean sees it as a feed with content instead. A feed with Audio, Music, Photos, Videos, Calendar, Documents, etc. Returning to the Real Estate agent. Agent is able to show pictures of the house over a calendar year, take a video of neighborhood and show a July 4 parade in town. Beyond that, citing the Channel 9 video, you have the ability to subscribe to a calendar of events for a conference. Hands off to Scoble.

Scoble says blog is the best relationship building device the world has ever seen. Blog allows for a relationship with thousands of people. Hasn't really changed his blog in past 5 years. But how does he go beyond the text? How does he make the relationship more rich? For instance, many executives at Microsoft may not have the best writing skills, but they can speak and demonstrate very well, and the videos create a way for the executives to speak to the customers without having to type up a blog. Channel 9 came out around the same time as Nike's blog, but that blog was Nike talking out to people without listening, whereas Channel 9 allows for comments from customers and makes sure the customers are placed on the same level as the bloggers. Added a wiki feature to Channel 9 to allow anyone to create a blog on Channel 9. Customer created the IE page on Channel 9, not Microsoft. IE team watches the page every day, and it's integral to their creating the software.

Dean back. Ask yourself what's the most interesting thing you can put out on the web. Is it just text/commentary or is it samples of design elements, etc. Blogs with richer information. Beyond feeds with content are Lists. Music, Video playlists, event calendars, document libraries, wish lists, to-do lists, top 10 lists. There are certain types of information that aren't necessarily good for a feed. For instance, list of houses in a neighborhood. If that info came in as a feed, the experience would be odd because updates come in as single items. That is, each house would show up as one entry. And if information about that house changes, the updated information comes in as an entirely different entry. Lists are a bit different because they would update themselves rather than simply adding a later item. Based on the Simple List Extension announced at Gnomedex. Amazon is using it. Microsoft is hoping businesses will start to use it.

Sean back to demonstrate. Using real estate agent again. List of houses available. User might want to know about the houses and when the prices change. Extension allows publisher to define list. And specify what the elements of the list are. Software can use the elements defined by the publisher to present the list and what's changed about the list. Software will tell the user what's changed in the list.

Dean: This is another way to build a relationship and engage with customers.

Sean: But what Amazon can do is something different. Showing a live Amazon feed using list extensions. Can now see relevant items for wish lists, or music albums, and sort that list by different elements like price, genre, year, etc. What's cool about the extension is that everyone can use it since it's under the Creative Commons License, every aggregator can implement these extensions. (While this is true, it's not really germane for most businesses. RSS is available to the public, but most people don't know how to write up an RSS feed. Blogging software creates the RSS feed for users. Someone's going to have to create software that will help a company create a feed with a list extension.)

Dean: But why not just go to the Amazon site? People do and always will, but with the examples of wish lists, you don't want to have to keep going back and checking if a wish list was updated, and then figure out what items on the list changed. It's much easier to just subscribe. Back to real estate example, after a person buys a house, the agent can get feedback from customer, as well as update them about changes in the market, or in the neighborhood, etc. What this means is that a customer could subscribe to a feed for a neighborhood. Part of that feed will include what houses are available for sale in the neighborhood, what the prices of those homes are, and how the prices change over time. (Beyond just home sales, though, you could have a list of streets that are going have construction done on them, and the dates of the construction. And, naturally, when the dates of the construction are extended indefinitely into the future.)

There are a couple of other examples, but you get the idea. I think this is a really cool feature, but it needs some development before it can be useful for most businesses. Beyond that, it's going to take mass adoption of RSS for it to be useful. And while Microsoft is investing big in RSS for Vista, not everyone is going to upgrade to Vista right away. That being said, though, it's quite cool that this technology is going to be out there.

My spam question wasn't addressed in the questions from the audience, so I approached Dean about this after the presentation, and he handed me off to Sean. I used the example of a person who currently gets the popup and clicks and suddenly their machine is infected with malware. With the list extensions and feeds, the person gets a popup and suddenly their feed list is clogged with spam, pornography, etc. Instead of someone's wish list, you have a list of adult film titles. Sean noted that the case of the popup will be protected. The subscribe function won't allow scripts to execute independently. Meaning if you click on the subscribe button in the toolbar, the site won't then be able to subscribe you to a bunch of junk or illicit feeds. It's a two step process where you are presented with one feed at a time and subscribe to one feed at a time. There will be a one-click subscribe function, but the user will have to intentionally enable it before it becomes available.

I asked about downloadable malware that then writes a bunch of junk into the feed list. Sean said that there isn't a way for Microsoft to prevent this. By having the feed list open to all aggregators (for instance Bloglines or Newsgator, etc.) it will also be open to malware programs on your hard drive. Sean said that the challenge is not to let malware get on the machine in the first place. And unfortunately he's right. Users will always be able to download junk onto their machine, and fending off malware will be a problem long into the future.

The upshot is that clicking on a popup window won't expose you to a load of junk feeds, but if you do get some malware, it will be able to wreak some havoc with your feed list.

Edited and updated. Thanks to Dean for commenting.

tag: blogbusinesssummit