Editorializing weblogs.asp.net

I was catching up on the weblogs feeds this morning and ran across a couple of articles where people were worried about the influx of MSFT people from GotDotNet to weblogs.asp.net.

The main concerns are that the blogs on weblogs.asp.net will somehow become editorialized. I wanted to confirm that I’ve personally received email from Bill (Gates that is) that all blog entries must now be reviewed by Microsoft legal, the Microsoft board, as well as every member of the marketing and product teams before posts can go live. We hope to get this process streamlined and that posts should be live within 45-60 business days.

By the way…I’m kidding!!!

I’ve also read some negative comments about the domain ‘weblogs.asp.net’. The reason we’re using this domain is that Scott’s .Text engine is hosted on the ASP.NET servers. We offered to host .Text/weblogs.asp.net for free so everyone could continue using Scott’s great blogging engine and so more people could join. Believe it or not, servers, bandwidth, software, etc. still costs money – we want to see this community continue to grow and thrive without Scott having to pick up the tab each month!

There have also been some concerns about posting criticism of MSFT products. Lot’s of people – including those of us that build the technologies to be criticized – read the blogs on weblogs.asp.net. Moving your blog somewhere else would only mean that it’s going to be harder to act on your feedback. For example, Paul didn’t like how our cross-page posting feature worked. We took the feedback after reading his weblog and changed the behavior. P.S., it’s usually good to follow up with an email about these kinds of things (ASP.NET related) to: rhoward@microsoft.com or scottgu@microsoft.com to ensure it gets seen.

I hope that helps to answer some of the questions – also please give a warm welcome to our friends from GotDotNet as they move their blogs here.