It's a Blog World After All

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Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond right now. "The Scobleizer," as he's known to his daily readers, writes a Web log, or blog, posting comments on topics that range from the world's largest pistachio factory to how cheap it is to eat in Shanghai. Mostly, though, he writes about Microsoft. On January 27, 14 of the 31 posts he made between midnight and the time he went to bed, sometime after 3:41 a.m., were about the software giant or its products. But the Scobleizer is no ordinary Windows-obsessed blog jockey. He is, in fact, a Microsoft employee. He's a "technical evangelist," to be precise, whose job includes communicating with customers on the Web. One way he does this is by writing blogs. He gets feedback from tech-savvy readers on how to improve Microsoft products, and at times, he's even mildly critical of his employer. After Microsoft threatened a teen who registered MikeRoweSoft.com, Scoble wrote this: "It's unfortunate that we went after a 17-year-old named 'Mike Rowe,' though. I'm sorry that happened to you Mike."

What's this? Humility from the House of Gates? That's life in the blog world, where one whiff of PR or marketing spin will instantly mark you as phony. "If my credibility goes down," says Scoble, "then what do I have?" Though he's just one of hundreds of employee bloggers at the software giant, Scoble is by far the most widely read. More than 850 blogs and 1,300 sites link to him, putting him right up there with Howard Dean's Blog for America at its height. And he's aware of his power: "I know I'm playing with dynamite," Scoble says.