Hello World!

My name is Paolo Barone and I just joined the Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism team in the UK, working in the Academic team.

But who am I? And what does it mean "Evangelism"? And why did I think (yet) another blog would be useful for the world?

Well, first of all something about me. I will soon publish my CV here (just in case someone will ever be interested), but in a nutshell I am a person who is really passionate about technology in pretty much all shapes and forms.

I am especially interested in everything around software design and development, user experience, rich media and how technology (and especially software) can be used to provide useful and usable services to people.

Then.... what is this Evangelism thing? Being Italian, this word has a very clear connotation to me and so when I learned that Microsoft has a team of Evangelists I was a bit puzzled and started doing some research. Of course I did what nowadays everybody does and started up Wikipedia and found this very interesting article which contains this definition "An evangelist promotes the use of a particular product or technology through talks, articles, blogging, user demonstrations, recorded demonstrations, or the creation of sample projects"... Mmmmm.... Interesting I thought, I would like to learn more.

And so I started following some blogs, attend presentations, look at demos put together by some of the Evangelists and started getting really excited about it all but still did not grasp (or should I say grok?) it all until.... I heard one of the UK evangelists explaining it all:

"Being an Evangelist means I can use the word cool a lot".

Now that is really cool!!!!!!

Fast forward a few months and now I can say cool a lot too and that is again really cool!!!!!

Having said all of this... I decided to start this blog to share my views on things. It will (probably) cover a lot of technology. Of course will be a lot Microsoft stuff but not only. From time to time I will probably digress into other subjects I care about, curious or fun stuff....

I will do my best to keep this alive and interesting and hope to contribute somehow to something.

P.