A-lister and former Microsoftie uber-blogger, Robert Scoble, asks on his now indie-blog, Scobleizer, “What if I sold ads here?”

Most of his readers are urging him to have a go, including yours truly :

“… I’d avoid the likes of Federated Media, though, as they take 40pc of revenues. Take a little advice from an ad pro on pricing and throw out some feelers to that encyclopedic list of tech contacts you have. I reckon once you’ve tried it, you’ll never look back. Getting paid for something is not just about the money, it’s about knowing the worth of what you’re doing.”

Scoble is a typical example of someone blogging for reputation and attention. Being an “influential” delivers a lot of leverage in the tech world, and leads to many career opportunities that might not have come otherwise.

Advertising, or monetizing your site, is not just about squeezing extra juice out of the lemon — or stone, as the case may be — but marks the moment when you turn from amateur scribbler to media pro. You’re still self-publishing, of course, but if the public is prepared to pay reasonably well for it, you are well beyond the vanity press stage.

Scoble gets a lot of quality traffic, including a large loyal readership, it would be very interesting to see what the results are.

Might he be planning to go down the PaidContent.org route? Is Scobleizer Inc just over the horizon? It will be fascinating to watch.

Ye Gods! Have you read the latest public relations excercise for IE7 (Internet Explorer) on Microsoft’s IE blog?

You would think we were being asked to prepare for the second coming of Jesus Christ. When I finished reading it I was almost shaking in my boots.

What is this phenomenon rapidly approaching our shores? Hurricane Browser?

The list of Things-To-Do to prepare for the deluge include downloading a previous “release candidate” to make sure it doesn’t zap your system (too late if it does, no doubt) and downloading a special “Readiness Toolkit” to ensure you have no lurking enemies of IE hanging around.

But it doesn’t end there. These guys are really motoring now. “Download and use the Application Compatibility Toolkit”. When you’ve finished messing about with that : “Visit the Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Center”.

There’s more : “Use the Information Index for Internet Explorer7″ and : “Read the IE Team Blog”.

Worse, you’re going to get it whether you like it or not — if you’re on automatic Windows update.

I can’t recall jumping through so many hoops when I downloaded Firefox.

This is a good example of what I call The Leviticus Strategy, after the Old Testament book. Reduce your punters to submission with an list of instructions so long they naturally assume you’re a great authority on the subject.

C’mon Microsoft, you may be paranoid, but why should you infect your customers as well?

And what on earth is it going to be like when Windows Vista, the greatest juggernaut of them all, hoves into view next year?

I think I’ll book one of Richard Branson’s flights to the moon. The vista may be calmer there.

Mary Jo Foley, the doyenne of Microsoft Watchers, has left Ziff Davis Media to pursue her own interests, namely writing about Microsoft as a blogger at ZDNet.

In a farewell interview, she says : “Blogging is the future of journalism, in my opinion. More and more bloggers are not just reacting to — but actually breaking — news. I wanted to try my hand at running a business that was blog-centric from the get-go. So I decided to take my show on the road.”

She’s right, of course, all the top newspaper titles have realized they can’t beat the online journalists for speed of reporting. That’s why they are increasingly taking a more expansive line on news through op-ed columns and magazine-type features.

But I think she should style herself a little differently, as a Web-based journalist and analyst.

Mary Jo is a serious journalist who’s broken many a MySoft story in the few years I wrote about them. Together with Robert Scoble, Ed Bott and less than a handful of other sources, she was the one you turned to when the big cataclysms struck Redmond.

[Original source]

We’ve written a lot in Syntagma about Windows Vista and what it will mean for Microsoft as a business and as an increasingly monolithic company.

Now John Naughton of the UK’s Observer Sunday newspaper has spelt out the future with some clarity. First, though, you have to bear in mind that The Observer is a “left wing” paper, so has a natural affinity with the open-source software model. With desk-top Linux as it is, however, it’s not at all clear that the future lies there. But let’s keep an open mind about that.

Naughton describes the slow agony of the Vista development process very well. “Never again”, is his sensible conclusion. The fault, he rightly says, is the perceived need for “backward compatibility” (using old files and processes) which stifles innovation, plus Vista’s monolithic architecture which had to be scrapped in 2004 and completely reworked.

Naughton then zeros-in on Virtualization — “a key technology that enables a single machine to run several operating systems (or modules thereof) in parallel — to deal with the backwards compatibility problem.”

“Virtualization is the Next Big Thing in computing, and the lesson of Vista is that Microsoft will have to embrace it to survive in the operating system market.”

The problem for Microsoft is that the leader in the technology is Xensource, a company that began life in Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory. Ironically, not only is the lab housed in the William Gates Building, but Xen’s core technology is open source. Eventually, when a deal is done with Microsoft, Xensource could become the most sought-after company on the planet.

Isn’t this a good investment opportunity then? Not so fast. “If you were thinking of investing, however, I’m afraid you’ve missed the boat. John Doerr, the world’s greatest venture capitalist (Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Lotus, Intuit, Genentech, Millennium, Netscape, Amazon and Google, inter alia), got there before you.”

So the “Syntagma Solution” is probably on the cards after all?