Happy New Year!

As blogs become more a part of daily life for developers, we wanted to make them more accessible to more developers and make it easier for devs to use blogs. So today I’m pleased to announce that MSDN is launching blogs.msdn.com. My new blogging home will be http://blogs.msdn.com/saraw. Maybe I'll even decorate soon. ;-)

We are using the same blogging infrastructure that powers weblogs.asp.net so you'll see MSFT bloggers listed in both places. It made good sense from an operational perspective for us, and it also provides better functionality for bloggers and readers.

On other fronts, I had a great meeting today with some of MSDN's site managers. One of the interesting things that they pointed out is that in general, the blog entries that we host on our dev centers get more click-throughs than our headlines. Now, headlines are the holy grail at lots of websites - we put lots of time and energy into thinking about what we headline. It's the topic of much (heated) debate, and it often takes several people several hours to decide on all the headlines for a week.

I think it's fascinating to think about the interpretations.

One is that people are just more interested in Duncan's New Year's resolution than they are in the VB resource kit (which is really cool, btw). Or that we're headlining the wrong stuff, or that the dev center bloggers are just really really. really compelling writers (it is "midyear career discussion" time at MSFT, so I'm sure that I'll be hearing that from a few folks.<g>) Or that people come to the dev center home pages when they are browsing or surfing, and that the format and style of a blog is more appealing when you're just out for a stroll around the net. Anyway, I thought that it was an interesting and definitely worthy of more thought.

-Sara