This past week went by quickly, but a lot of my time was spent at VON Canada, Jeff Pulver's famous conference which held its first ever Canadian edition of the show (more about interesting happenings at this event in another entry).  Hence, Technology Futurist could not keep up with the flurry of activity during this eventful week.

One noteworthy development was Bill Gates' comments on blogging technology this part Thursday.  In his keynote speech delivered at the 2004 Microsoft CEO Summit, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told some of the world's biggest moguls about the blog phenomenon.  The annual gathering at the Microsoft Redmond campus brings together distinguished business leaders such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Michael Dell, Barry Diller, Carly Fiorina, Gerald Grinstein and Stephen Riggio, among others.

Mr. Gates told these execs about the blog disruption wave that has been sweeping across the Internet, bringing about profound changes in which information is being disseminated.  Blogs have been around for many years, being built by web enthusiasts wanting to share information ranging from technical reviews to political commentary.  However, according to the Microsoft Chairman, businesses only now have started to understand the potential of a blog as a way to communicate more directly with their customers, partners and employees.

Gates believes that blogging will eventually encompass not only the "technical enthusiast space", but also the "business space", thanks in part to progress in RSS(Real Simple Syndication) technology.  RSS enables readers to track newly updated information from various web sources without having to browse through a long list of pages.  By adding several RSS feeds, a blog author can enable his reader to read fresh information, as it becomes available, on a variety of topics.

Perhaps Bill was taking a page out of his own company.  Microsoft employees are blogging increasingly more, with over 1,500 publicly known blogs (572 at blogs.msdn.com and 991 at weblogs.asp.net).  Dare Obasanjo has an entry on his site detailing a bit of history of blogging at Microsoft. 

The speech can also signal that Microsoft is interested in pursuing blogging as a strategic initiative.  The company's MSN Internet division is currently developing a blog searching tool.  Furthermore, Microsoft is also keen on including features such as reading RSS news feeds as part of its new Windows operating system (codenamed Lognhorn).  The goal here would not only be innovation, but also competitive positioning versus Google.  Google is emerging as a potential competitor and last year acquired Blogger, a popular blog-writing tool.