ActiveWin.com: What exactly do you do at Microsoft?

Scoble: I'm a technical evangelist. Most evangelists here work with developers to help them build software for the next versions of our platforms. For instance, Windows Vista. Most of them work with specific companies. Me? I work with the community at large.

My day job is Channel 9. I walk around Microsoft with a camcorder and interview people about what they are working on. By doing that I get the community details on our products, services, and platforms that would be hard to get anywhere else.

ActiveWin.com: Your Wikipedia article states you are the Chief Blogging Officer at Microsoft? Is that an official title?

Scoble: No. I think that's funny, though.

ActiveWin.com: What got you started in blogging?

Scoble: I was working as a conference planner in the late 1990s. I helped plan VSLive and the now defunct CNET Builder.com Live conference. Every year I asked the speakers what they thought we should cover at next year's conference. In 2000 Dori Smith and Dave Winer talked to me about blogging. I didn't think it was important enough to do a conference session on (I could only find a couple hundred blogs at the time) but they talked me into doing one of my own. I started on December 15, 2000. Within a few weeks I had gotten a link from Dave Winer, who sent several thousand people, which told me there was more to it than just a couple hundred blogs, and got invited to Steve Wozniak's Superbowl party too.

ActiveWin.com: How did the idea for Channel 9 come about?

Scoble: After the 2003 PDC (Microsoft's big developer conference) we were sitting around comparing notes. Some things we noticed is that people liked us (Microsoft employees) after meeting us. That reduced their fear and got them to see that we were just passionate technologists and not quite as evil as they'd heard about us.

So, we were wondering how we could meet more customers face-to-face. The PDC is great, but we could only potentially touch a few thousand people that way and we have millions of developers around the world.

We knew that to reach more people it'd have to be on the Web. We threw around a bunch of ideas and we remembered United Airlines' Channel 9 that let people listen to what the pilots were doing. That reduced our fear of flying. So, we thought "why don't we do our own Channel 9?"

Scoble: We got a lot of PR mileage out of just showing up and writing in a way that people didn't expect. For instance, I regularly say nice things about our competitors and regularly bash our own offerings. I also linked to people who said that "Microsoft sucks" (or worse). That caused some interesting behaviors. People stopped yelling and started having conversations with us. They started emailing me with both good and bad things Microsoft was doing. And, even better, they started posting product requests. In fact, over on Channel 9's wiki there are dozens of pages of product requests that customers have done -- those pages weren't done by Microsoft. For me, though, what changed is that now everyone can figure out how to talk with us. Just go to Google/Yahoo/MSN and type "OneNote blog" for instance, and you'll find Chris Pratley, the guy who runs the OneNote team. In the old days the only way to tell a team like that what you want was to head over to one of our newsgroups. But if you did that you'd never know if the right person got the message.

ActiveWin.com: At first, were you ever afraid the negative things you posted might affect your job stability?

Scoble: Yeah. I knew I was playing with dynamite and it might blow off my hand, or worse. But I knew Microsoft's culture pretty well, and I had lots of relationships with people and I knew that the executives wanted Microsoft to change. So that helped me get over my fears.

Scoble: I like him. He helps Microsoft look at itself and improve itself. It's a bit uncomfortable, yes, but I'd rather he be there than not.

ActiveWin.com: Were you involved in the Windows Vista naming process at all? What do you think of the name?

Scoble: No, I wasn't. I am warming up to the name. It's a lot better than many of our names. I wish we were a lot better at product naming than we are. Naming things "Microsoft Windows Tablet Edition 2005" just doesn't make my heart warm.

ActiveWin.com: How will blogs change Vista’s development cycle from, say, Windows XP’s, if at all?

Scoble: That's a tough one cause I wasn't around for XP. I am already noticing that the information that the community gets is better and more complete due to blogs. And, certainly if you talk with teams like the Internet Explorer one, they'll tell you that blogs played a key part in helping them focus on the top features that everyone wanted.

ActiveWin.com: Your position allows you to meet a variety of people across Microsoft most other employees wouldn't have an opportunity to. What are some of your favorite Channel 9 stories you have done?

ActiveWin.com: Channel 9 has become a big player in the Windows community landscape.  What kind of limitations does that put on you, being run by Microsoft?  How does it affect your interaction with independent sites?

Scoble: Well, I can't run leaked screen shots. Heheh.

But, I try to do videos that the independent sites couldn't do. I really try to get to teams that ActiveWin and the other independent sites are interested in to give them more depth on a story and let them meet some of the people they might have read about in press reports.

ActiveWin.com: Do you think companies who crave secrecy like Google and, even more so, Apple will eventually grow to embrace corporate blogging?

ActiveWin.com: Where do you see the future of Channel 9 going, as it evolves and matures with time?

ActiveWin.com: You’ve often described your blog as a corporate blog yet often venture into very private matters.  Where do you draw the line?

ActiveWin.com: Speaking of which, how do you manage to juggle your family life with the already hectic work-life and a severe blogging addiction?

Scoble: Who said I managed that well? It's a struggle, that's for sure.

ActiveWin.com: What are a few of your favorite blogs?

Scoble: Hmm, every morning I start out with http://tech.memeorandum.com which is a tech site that analyzes the linking behavior of the top tech blogs and presents a news page. I still read Dave Winer's blog every day. A new one that I find is very good is TechCrunch. Engadget. I have 1,400 blogs I read on a regular basis. Yeah, I've been slowing down since Memeorandum came along. Since that brings me most of the stuff I'd be looking for anyway, and it's updated every five minutes.

It used to take me up to six hours to read through that many feeds.

ActiveWin.com: What do you want your next job at Microsoft to be? Where do you see yourself in 5 years at the company?

ActiveWin.com: Do you have anything to add?