Microsoft Battles Blogger

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Just in case your one of those people who thinks there isn’t enough blogging software currently available, it looks like Christmas may be coming a little early for you. Microsoft is is scheduled to offer MSN Spaces the MSN version of Blogger. While Blogger wasn’t an in-house creation of Google, they did realize it’s power and snapped it up from it’s creator Evan Williams. Evan is smart guy who left Google just after they had their IPO so he made out pretty handsomely in the deal (Evan Williams Leaving Google).

So what’s all the fuss about blogging? There are accountant blogs, screen writer blogs, Batman blog heck even Caliburn has a blog now! So why would a search engine want to own one? Well search engine engineers figured out blogging, done by real people, was a pretty good idea of what was hot, and what people were interested in, which would fit pretty nicely into their search ranking algorithms. Now some less than ethical search engine optimizers (SEO) might use this to their advantage. So Google snarfed up blogger and put some controls in place to make it more difficult/obvious for them to be taken advantage of (not that I know anybody who does that sort of thing mind you).

It looks like MSN is just playing catch-up. They also are at work on a desktop search engine just like Google’s desktop search (news). Will this be success? Unless they come up with some mechanism for importing the posts from an existing blog I can’t see many abandoning what they have in place. However should any of you need to start a new blog, give it a shot, and give graywolf some first hand reconnaissance.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - High-Tech: Microsoft debuts MSN Spaces for bloggers

ps Juan BTW I was going to use just a boxing glove but I found a picture with a woman and didn’t want to let down.

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