Did Bill Gates telling the CEOs in attendence at Microsoft's eighth annual CEO summit about blogging and RSS really chance things? I suspect most of these people had heard about blogs and RSS before. What they hadn't heard was a seeming endorsement by one of the world's leaders of technical change. After all, love him or hate him, you have to acknowledge that Bill has a nose for capitalizing on technical trends.

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.

From Did Bill Gates shake the blogosphere? :: AO
Referenced Mon May 24 2004 07:19:08 GMT-0600