And this is likely to be the last post I make to this blog. By the time you read this I will have likely handed in my card key and celebrated with the great people I’ve worked with over the last 7 years. One of the key values that Microsoft instills...

For anyone that's just learning basic HTML. I suggest this tutorial... http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/12/lolcat-alignright

A co-worker recently asked me to share some tips on interviewing people at Microsoft. I wrote a few up and figured I'd share them here as well. I love interviewing people and I get a lot of my style and tips from Gretchen since she’s done more interviews...

There was a lot of good discussion in this one, but I tried taking notes on my windows mobile phone. I'd say it was an experiment to see what would happen if I had "twittered" a session or if I just wanted to make sure I thought about the notes I took...

Incentives Influencer relationships such as the MVP program Connect them to your product teams so they get insider information Software coupons and give-aways. New reward every year. Need rigorous process to qualify the MVPs Visual, Branded, recognition...

Question : Should there be ads in the community? Some people don't care, some people are really opinionated. The consensus was that "if they are done right". Question : What are the different methods of putting ads on new Community Sites Babycenter.com...

I'm at the computer history museum in the valley attending the Online Community Unconference . I'll try and blog notes as a take them, but the pace looks to be fast and I'm not sure I'll be able to capture much in a consumable form for anyone other than...

This was a great read that I found through Seth Godin's blog . Troll whisperers aren't necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there's always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software...

You know, the person that everyone listens to, makes outlandish statements that may offend people on occasion, and then has to issue statements like this... Everyone has days and events in life they’d love to push the rewind button on, yesterday was one...

I posted my experience being hit and run by a car yesterday on my personal blog. I'm posting the link here as a cautionary tale for other softies I know bike to work regularly. I saw a red car out of the corner of my eye quickly cut in-front of me and...

I was on a thread where a dev lead asked if anyone had tips to share on motivating his team to engage regularly with customers through blogs, forums, etc. Paul Yuknewicz shared a great set of tips that I'm republishing with his permission. Get the team...

Yes, Amazon has the best social software on the web. They've been quietly innovating for the last couple of years and it is unfortunate that people just think about their amazing catalog of user reviews and don't think of them as an innovation hub for...

Your customers have greatly evolved since the previous internet bubble, while most company’s customer support models have not grown with them. New, “Web 2.0” paradigms for content creation, publication, syndication, and consumption bring with them an...

This is the last of the notes i took at the Summit that I was able to actually write down. On Forums… “After posting an answer to a question there should be a link that goes directly back to a the filtered “unanswered” page you started from instead of...

Dare has one good point and one bad point about the new google mymaps feature that we've had for a while. Source: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google MyMaps vs. Frappr: A Feature Isn't a Business As usual the reactions from the blog pundits are equal...

I thought this was pretty cool .

User Groups We do great at participating in our conferences, but we don’t focus on the breadth of developer user groups like we should. One of the better ideas was that we provide “presentation kits” to user groups. We create a topic and a talk with additional...

I spent a lot of time at the MVP summit this past year. My team doesn’t have any MVPs, but our work is obviously valuable to customers. I’ll thank the C# team for graciously inviting us to spend some time talking with their MVPs. I took a whole lot of...

Last week 761 developer customer questions were answered in our online communities by members of our customer support staff. These are the folks helping to bridge the knowledge transfer gap for .NET 2.0 and 3.0 that I talked about last week . The effort...

Source: The JobSyntax Blog : Microsoft and cool: so close yet so far :) Anyway, I love the end of the article, in which Fred reveals that a Microsoft employee inadvertently emailed him PR's file on him, Wired, and Microsoft's talking points surrounding...

Of course the following story would be comical if I could say that nothing like this ever happens here. Source: AOL: Powerpoint paralysis - Valleywag ...Straightforward enough. Splice in the different databases, slap a name on the product, pray. Not for...

Something I'd love to see Microsoft do more of is small, simple, solutions to annoying problems that would delight customers. Here is a perfect example. Google Gode Prettifier A simple Javascript and CSS file, the Google Code Prettifier makes syntax highlighting...

I'm often asked how products teams can best participate in their online communities. It would be simple to say "go talk to customers" and be done with it, but you can have a more targeted approach than that. They key to successful support communities...

There is truth in every recomendation from the following post. Source: Creating Passionate Users: User Community and ROI In Building a User Community Part 1 we talked about the importance of not only a strict "There Are No Dumb Questions" policy, but...

The interesting thing is that the same forum could be hosted in different widgets on different sites if I read the post correctly. Freewebs continues to add to their widget catalog with their new forums widget. This customizable plug-in is available for...