Penny Arcade's Jerry "Tycho" Holkins gripes about Microsoft blogging, I respond...
Context & Ripple Effects
The gripe lands mid-arc in a running argument about how Microsoft talks to the web. Dave Winer had already gone back and forth with a Microsoft blogger in his response to Sean Lyndersay at the end of 2006, and two days before this post Mike Arrington was swatting away CNET's framing of Microsoft critics in his CrunchNotes riposte — so Holkins' complaint about Microsoft blogging arrives into an environment already primed with skepticism about the company's online voice.
The messenger matters as much as the message: Penny Arcade runs PAX, where new-media questions were already being argued on stage in Joystiq's account of Chris G.'s PAX panel appearance, so when Tycho complains about Microsoft's blogging, he is speaking from the exact community Microsoft's Windows Live and gaming outreach is trying to win over.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's blogging staff now have a high-visibility critic whose audience is precisely the gaming demographic their outreach targets, forcing a choice between engaging publicly and absorbing the criticism silently.
Second-order effects
- Independent bloggers like Winer and Arrington, already trading blows with Microsoft defenders and CNET respectively, gain a fresh hook to keep the authenticity-of-corporate-blogs debate alive at each other's expense.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate blogging gets judged by community figures rather than press reviewers, pushing Microsoft toward either genuinely conversational publishing or retreat to controlled channels — the same software-plus-services push behind Windows Live makes that choice harder to defer.
The trend: Corporate blogging is shifting from a novelty PR channel to a credibility test, with independent community voices like Penny Arcade setting the terms Microsoft must meet.