The Charge of the Blog Brigade
posted by DL Byron on July 11, 2005
The embrace and extend term didn’t go unmentioned when Microsoft announced its support for RSS. While you didn’t hear much of it from the RSS Lovefest that was Gnomedex, it was quickly added to the WikiPedia, moved up in Google, and the Register. Today, the PI reports on how MS employees are creating podcasts and calling them blogcasts to avoid mentioning Apple’s iPod.
When Wired published Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill , you could read about an MS culture clash, lead, in part, by Scoble who responded to the Wired article by proclaiming, “I’m not supposed to have an iPod? Hogwash!” In that post, Scoble says, “I think it’s a positive thing to study your competitors and figure out what they’ve done well and look at what you aren’t doing well and improve it.” Exactly and that follows the changes in communication that Scoble and Shel are writing about in Naked Conversations. Then how does renaming pop technoculture, or creating a nonApple umbrella brand called Plays for Sure (everything but Apple), to suit your business do that? It doesn’t.
Eric Rice chatted with me about this topic today and said that, if given an opportunity to start over with a name, he’d call it “spacecasting.” On Pug Blog, we call it “pugcasting,” as a dog joke and on the Stratoblog we’ll call it “stratocasting.” Unfortunately, it’s too late for a better name for “podcasting and when Microsoft bloggers do it, just to not mention iPods, they’re bullying the blogosphere. Embrace and extend is their own blog burden to bear and they should know that.
While Scoble leads the charge of the blog brigade at Microsoft, it’s apparent there’s dissension in the troops and an underlying idignant “not invented here.” Is Microsoft listening to Scoble or just to themselves? Scoble and more Microsoft bloggers will be at the next Blog Business Summit and this topic is sure to come up.
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