Bill Gates on blogging

In his remarks at Microsoft’s CEO Summit 2004, Bill Gates made it clear that he thinks blogging is cool. And he actually took a shot at explaining RSS.

Another new phenomenon … is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.

This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, , but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.

This site has an RSS feed. Judging by my referrer logs, quite a few people are using RSS readers to stay current with this site. If you’re not using an RSS reader, and instead you visit this site in your Web browser, I’d be interested in knowing why. Leave a comment here, or send me a note.

Personally, I think e-mail newsletters are almost useless anymore. Thanks to spam and the countermeasures we’re forced to use to block unsolicited material, it’s impossible for any publisher or marketer to reliably deliver a product via e-mail. Can you imagine how long a daily newspaper would survive if 30% of all copies never arrived?

RSS is exciting. I think within two years you will see people turning blogs and RSS feeds into legitimate, profit-making, fast-growing businesses. Meanwhile, the popularity of e-mail newsletters is going to shrink. They won’t disappear, but they’ll become far less important.

Oh, and based on what Bill G. said, I would certainly expect Longhorn to have some serious RSS reading and authoring capabilities built into it.