Last week it was Nick Carr with his “The Great Unread” missive tearing up Techmeme and causing about half the Technorati 100 to rip into him (and boost his traffic numbers through the roof, one can assume).

This week it’s Robert Scoble tearing into Microsoft and the Windows Live team for claiming to have the world’s largest blogging service in the form of Windows Live Spaces. While the germ of a valid argument is there (are social networks blogs? are enterprise blogs, blogs?) and should be debated, I can’t help but see this as a linkbait post on Robert’s part. Well, it worked.

Some comments:

The “Influentials don’t matter” to Windows Live argument

“Yesterday someone who works on the Windows Live team was taunting me with ‘influentials don’t matter, we got to be #1 and we don’t care that there aren’t any influential bloggers using our stuff.’”

My entire job on the Windows Live team exists because we VERY clearly understand that influentials matter. In short, my job description is to figure out who the most influential bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters are (and “influential” does not always mean “A-list” as it dramatically varies by technology, and authority in a given area); listen to them; understand what they are talking about, linking to, etc; and work with our product, marketing, and PR teams to reach out to them in the right way.

So whoever said that to isn’t fully aware of what the strategy and priorities are for Windows Live, pure and simple. Even in the marketing and PR teams, everyone’s favorite whipping boys these days, they get the critical importance of influentials to the success of Windows Live. Please do point your source my way so we can have a conversation and I can share where our priorities are. I don’t care how senior they are either – if they are actually making comments like that to you, I obviously have a lot more work to do internally.

Don’t believe me that we don’t care about influencers and bloggers? Look at last weekend with the Windows Live Writer beta launch. How many press releases did we send out? Where did the eventual main stream media coverage pick up the news from? We worked 100% with bloggers to get their opinions, get them early looks at the product, and let them set the conversation in the blogosphere (and we had no clue ahead of time if people would rant or rave about Writer, but that’s the risk you take). We knew the most influential bloggers would set the tone for the reception of the product, and we did our best to humbly reach out to them. Also, look at the application itself – it is clearly designed with serious bloggers in mind, both on Spaces and off.

“And why did your team sponsor “BlogHer?” Obviously they are important audience members to try to court.”

Yes, those audience members clearly are important to us, which is why we sponsor things like BlogHer (though we could have done MUCH better in how we sponsored, I won’t argue that), Gnomedex (I was on point for that – feel free to chat with me on why we sponsored it and how), Seatte Mindcamp, Mesh 2.0, Les Blogs, Web 2.0, Syndicate, and many other shows that connect with bloggers. And why we host things like Search Champs, which you have participated in and clearly is done to engage many of those influential bloggers who often vehemently disagree with us in unvarnished conversation.

Why you would possibly believe Windows Live doesn’t view influentials as important, based on the remark of one individual, is beyond me. Please feel free to email me (kevin.briody at microsoft dot com) and I’d be happy to share some of the rest of our thinking in this area. Based on the opinion you appear to have, I think you’d be surprised how important we do view influentials as.

The “I get to define what blogs are. Period” argument (that was a paraphrase)

Robert, I have always respected your opinions on things, but I agree with your old boss here:

“Seriously Robert, get over yourself already.”

Reread your quotes below. Tell me you wouldn’t absolutely tear someone up for making these comments in any forum:

“But, I wrote the book and we put that definition in there and no one argued with it when it became the best-selling blogging book. So, too late to argue the definition now.”

and this argument, when taken in the context of your other comments:

“In a ThinkWeek paper, accepted by Bill Gates, and discussed with him before MSN even started publishing Spaces (more than two years ago), we (not just me, but MS researchers too) defined blogging as having five things:“

You said it, therefore it must be true. BS and you know it. That is exactly the ivory tower elitism that bloggers rip on old media and BigCo’s for. YOU don’t get to define blogging any more than Microsoft, Six Apart or any one person or organization gets to. You can construct a litmus test for the sake of an argument, but others are free to rip your definition apart and put forth their own. The community will define, and continually redefine, what a blog is. You are but one player in that conversation, regardless of any book or ThinkWeek paper you put out.

Private blogs aren’t blogs

See my comment above about who gets to define what. Beyond that, I agree with the numerous other commenters who pointed out the fact of enterprise, behind the firewall blogs. Are they not “real” blogs then? Six Apart would argue that point. They meet every other criteria in your litmus test, and many use the same blogging software we all do for our public blogs. They are clearly blogs by my test.

On private blogs: Welcome to the future. Social software tools – from blogs to photo sharing to IM, etc – are increasingly powerful and accessible by the average computer user, and as a result you’ll see an increasing # of these used to connect with a small group of friends and family. As more and more private information gets indexed publicly, and more and more people become aware how exposed that is leaving them, we will see a trend of taking more of that information behind passwords and social networking invite lists. I love using Flickr and my photoblog to sharing family pictures and news with the people I love – however I’m also leery of exposing that to the world, especially ever since I discovered a range of people I barely knew were subscribing to the public RSS feed for photos of my baby girl. So I’m pulling all that behind a security blanket. And that concern for privacy is a serious and growing problem, especially when it comes to kids and families.

Is my photoblog not a “real” blog then? By your definition, I guess not. By my definition, it clearly still is. I use Wordpress, I use permalinks, etc. Who’s right? 

For an ever increasing number of people who want to use online services to have a conversation - but limit it to friends and families – that will be their experience with blogging tools.

If you want to exclude those who aren’t sharing with the masses from what counts, that will be to your – and the social software industry’s – loss.

wrap up…

Robert, I understand the root of your point is about a) what the definition of a blog is; b) that Live Spaces don’t meet that definition, and therefore c) that Microsoft is making false claims.

Your entire argument hinges on everyone using your definition of what a blog is. As you can read from the massive amount of comments and chatter, your definition is far from the accepted standard (again, regardless of where you published it), and that makes your “analysis” using ping servers an interesting exercise but simply one person’s opinion rather than any statement of fact. Fire away, make your opinion, but layering on top of it BS declarations of “it is what I say it is” simply undermines your point and credibility.

And making inflammatory arguments like “Windows Live doesn’t care about influentials” based on one conversation strikes me as a) willfully ignorant and lazy (did you bother asking anyone else on the team?) and b) linkbait (which obviously worked).