Personally, I always hated it when people in various product groups at Microsoft would ask me to blog about a specific launch or event… because if I decided to do it, my blog post would go up into a sea of similar posts all appearing within a few hours of each other on blogs.msdn.com. How does that make you, the reader, feel? Like you are having information pushed at you through a channel that is normally about technical matters. Now, if one blogger does that, that seems fine… they are involved in the product or event and they are excited about it… why shouldn’t they blog about it? But when 50 people do it, you can expect that someone behind the scenes decided that the power of blogs was too cheap and easy not to try and use it to promote their wares.

So, back to the point…. why didn’t we annouce http://on10.net more widely inside Microsoft? Why didn’t we send an email to all the top bloggers asking them to talk about it? Because they would have…. and that would have been slimy. Now, if we put the show up and those same bloggers find it on their own (via links from people like Scoble, who is on the on10.net team and works on show ideas with the rest of us) … like it… and then decide to talk about it. Well, that is natural and that is fine with me. It might be a slower way to spread info, but in the end you won’t end up ‘spamming’ a few thousand people who don’t care, you will hopefully end up speaking only to those people who will want to visit the site. Even now, with the site completely public and launched, I’m scared to send an annoucement to too many people inside the company at once… for fear that a large number of them would decide to tell someone else. Too much noise about something from a single source smells like a scam… even if it isn’t.