Speech team bloggers

We finally had a face-to-face get-together of the Microsoft speech team bloggers.  It was just an informal lunch, a way for us to talk about our experiences, the tools we use, and all those things we think about while blogging but rarely get a chance to speak about as a team.

We had two speech server PM bloggers Stephen and Anandi , and one developer (Gunnar), plus a few others, some of whom (like Jen) don't necessarily post much on their work blogs but are interested in blogging and like to stay in touch with people in the speech community through other means, like our newsgroups or the Yahoo Speech forum.  Unfortunately, Ken had another commitment, Jay was out of office, and at the last minute Rob couldn't make it.

One thing I learned is how few people use RSS aggregators like Bloglines or Newsgator or even the homepage feeds you can set up in Live.  I just don't know how you can follow lots of blogs without using a feed reader.  I track literally hundreds of blogs, many/most of them from fairly low-frequency (but very informative) posters, and my aggregator saves me the trouble of having to flip one at a time from site to site. You can now subscribe to RSS feeds through Outlook 2007 and through the Vista Sidebar, but so far none of us has really switched over -- I still think bloglines is the most efficient way.

We also talked about "team blogs" versus individual blogs. I'll be honest, the team blogs are less interesting to me because I think they defeat the purpose of blogs: providing a human face to a company.  If you want to hear the "official" voice of the Microsoft speech teams, go to our carefully-crafted website, with its professionally-produced content and PR-honed messaging.   On the other hand, precisely because the website is such a production, a lot of important information never gets published. Several people argued that team sites are a nice compromise, because you can hear from people who are otherwise too busy to deal with the hassle of setting up and maintaining a blog.  I guess so, but even then I'd propose that we just publish straight to the website. 

That said, I'm happy for anything that gets individual team members to interact with the community out there.  Which leads to my last point: if you read our blogs (and I know from the logs that there are thousands of you out there right now). be sure to leave comments (or if you're too shy, send a quick email).  One thing we all agreed is that hearing directly from our customers and developers is the main reason we like doing this.