WHY we blog

Did Bill Gates shake the blogosphere? Bill Gates told Warren Buffett about blogging on Thursday. Buffett, the legendary investor and moving force behind Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) (BRK.A), was in attendance at the eighth annual CEO summit put on by Microsoft (MSFT) in Redmond, Wash. Also on hand were Barry Diller of InteractiveCorp (IACI), Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com (AMZN) and Dell Inc.'s (DELL) Michael Dell. They all heard Gates describe blogs and RSS feeds as tools that "make it very easy to communicate" with customers, suppliers and employees. The result, according to New York public relations executive Steve Rubel, is likely to be a number of meetings of executives and their PR people and IT managers to explore this "blogging thing Bill Gates talked about." Rubel, of CooperKatz & Co., also wrote Friday morning, "The blogosphere changed. It feels very much like 1995 all over again." Gates' endorsement of blogging, Rubel said, is likely to lead to more businesses using it: "Bottom-up business communication will only gain steam here." But there's more to the story. Gates' comments were also "a veiled declaration of war on Six Apart, Userland, Google and anyone else who makes blogging tools." Rubel's blog is called MicroPersuasion. Microsoft has indeed been a booster of blogs. More than 700 employees publish the online diaries, often discussing projects and software in development. One of the more ambitious is Channel9, the work of five company employees who "want a new level of communication between Microsoft and developers." It includes descriptions of new technology, video interviews of Microsoft program managers and developers, and some gossip.