Editor's Note
Bring On the Swag
Joshua Trupin
Just because we're heads-down here at our editorial offices, laboring to bring you the finest in content for Windows-based development, doesn't mean that we don't pay attention to news, gossip, and rumors.
Suffice it to say that a recent story caught our interest. A few commentators were incensed over stories that a certain large software company based in the Pacific Northwest supplied laptops to some bloggers so they could evaluate Windows Vista. This was evidently the biggest transgression of all time and called into question the journalistic ethics of the entire blogosphere.
Supplying product to reviewers is a time-honored tradition in the world of publishing. How do you think books get reviewed? And how do you think magazines rate new MP3 players? They don't go out and buy one of each. You think we're going to spend our hard-earned money on 10 different version-control programs just to see which one has the most features?
We'd like to state for the record that our staff never gets anything good to review. We'd love to get nice new laptops with all the trimmings, but many of us have had to struggle by tirelessly on models that are almost six months old ("oh, the humanity"). Would it help if we made a list of products we may be "reviewing" over the next six months? A plasma TV would be nice. A big one, not one of those puny 42" jobs. We'd also consider reviewing 30 Zunes. Wait, make that 32. And maybe a pony.
The best part about the whole product review flap is the idea that bloggers need to live up to the ethics of professional journalists. Have you ever seen a professional journalist at a conference? They're the ones shoving giveaway pens into one pocket and complementary shrimp into the other. Present company excluded of course-we prefer bouncy balls to pens.
As blogging increases exponentially and becomes part of the culture at many companies, it has also changed the way information gets disseminated to customers-perhaps as much as the Internet itself did when everyday citizens and companies started to make greater use of it over a decade ago. This growth has been, as a whole, a great thing for everyone. Microsoft employees discuss the products they're working on, and loyal readers come away with better insight into the technology they use in their day-to-day work. MSDN Magazine has a regular blog now, which you can read at blogs.msdn.com/msdnmagazine. None of this takes the place of the in-depth coverage our magazine brings you, but blogs can be used to fill in gaps in your knowledge quite well.
Of course, as with all advances in communications, there are some abuses: blog spam and flogs. Spammers and frauds continually find ways to crack in and dump their crud onto us. You know the blog comments we're talking about. "Hey, this is a great blog about crocheting! Come visit mine at musclemaxsupplement.contoso.com!" So you click on the link, hoping to learn more about the needle arts, and the destination has almost nothing to do with crocheting at all.
Flogs, or fake blogs, are the other danger zone. Companies, or PR agencies working for them, will set up a blog that purports to be a grass-roots discussion of a great new technology. You're reading about how exciting the new color of crocheting yarn is, and all the ways that neon-green handmade ponchos will be in vogue this year, but you don't know that it was really written by the company that's marketing the neon-green acrylic. Anonymous comments on "real" blogs are occasionally created like this too. You can usually tell-the commenter has never said anything else, and all his messages are in defense of a particular technology, candidate, or company. But these gotchas are minor parts of the blog world, and you'll see the same tricks on the opinion pages of any newspaper.
Meanwhile, we'll just sit here and wait for all those Zunes. You've got the address, right?-J.T.
Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Moustafa Ahmed, Bashar Badawi, Joe Duffy, Shawn Farkas, Matt Gibbs, Jayu Katti, Joe Klug, Mark Lawrence, Rob Mensching, Tom Mulcahy, Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Stefan Schackow, Greg Schechter, Bob Schmidt, Tim Sneath, Aaron Stebner, and Robert Wlodarczyk.
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