Bob Caswell

About a week ago, a New York Times article titled “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter” painted a bleak picture for blogging by making pronouncements like “blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online.” The article then goes on to suggest that Twitter and Facebook are the culprits stealing blogs’ thunder.

While some prominent bloggers came to the defense and proved these pronouncements to be inaccurate or at least misleading, there were still some thoughts in this article that really resonated with me. For instance:

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A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were on a road trip through northern California when we decided to stop for lunch in a little town named Eureka. I couldn’t help but notice (and overhear) a few grandmas sitting in a booth across the way. They were very engaged in a lively conversation about sharing photos with daughters/grandkids.

One in particular was explaining how she preferred to use Facebook over MySpace because of her preference for how picture sharing works on Facebook. But then, one of the other grandmas interrupted and asked: “What’s MySpace?” Good question, I thought to myself, what is MySpace?

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Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft and enjoy my job. And this blog post is my opinion, not Microsoft’s.

This past week ended up being one of the most intense, yet rewarding, weeks of my career. For the past three weeks, I put my day job mostly on hold and took on the challenge of leading a team to put together a free virtual training event for Windows Phone 7 developers. We had developers in the thousands participating in four 3-hour sessions that covered the ins and outs of developing applications and games for Windows Phone 7.

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This weekend I wanted to catch up on the D8 conference, which is basically a series of who’s who in the tech industry being interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. The D8 website has dozens of 5-minute clips but offers no convenient way to watch them in one sitting. Some of us, you know, can handle watching (dare I say, want to watch) certain things more than 5 minutes at a time.

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Logan and I are at it again with another episode of our new podcast: Practically Ideal (get episode 2 here, right-click and select “Save Link As…”). This week we’re discussing progressivism (general Democrat views) vs. conservatism (general Republican views) and figuring out if/where we fit in.

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It’s a slow news day (should be, it’s Sunday) and good ol’ Mini-Microsoft has taken the top spot over at Techmeme. For those unfamiliar, Mini-Microsoft is an anonymous blogger and Microsoft employee who has been calling for radical change to happen at Microsoft for years. He (she?) has been quiet since the last round of layoffs but decided to share some praise today in a post titled “Microsoft Has Turned The Corner.”

From Mini’s blog:

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I know what you’re thinking: I work for Microsoft, so of course I’m going to use Bing! The truth is, though, that I’ve been using Google as my default search engine up until Bing was released two weeks ago. Previously, I just didn’t find any compelling reason to use Microsoft’s search engine(s). I like to think of myself as someone who doesn’t change habits just because he works for a company. Rather, I need to want to change a habit, if that makes sense.

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Michael Arrington discusses what he thinks is a fantastic idea in his latest post “Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp.” So Super Chirp is this new third party service that allows Twitter users the ability to charge others for access to their direct messages (Twitter’s private messaging system). The idea is that celebrities could say their extra special stuff to people who pay for it!

Here’s what I said in a comment on the TechCrunch post:

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