KevinHarder.com

A few Microsoft-related news items of interest that occurred over the past week:

The stories of Bill Gates transitioning at Microsoft and Scoble leaving have both been covered by thousands of other bloggers and discussed to no end.  But I have a fresh conspiracy theory to add to the mix (with an assist from Jose):  Bill really decided to move on because he finally gave up on getting Rob to come back to Microsoft. Scoble (with advance knowledge of this) decided to leave because he was passed over for the Chief Software Architect position in favour of Ray Ozzie. Of course, I could be wrong. =)

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Many in the Community Server community know that Major Nelson (of XBox fame) recently switched his blog from WordPress to Community Server and is running an early build of CS 2.1. And now Dave Weller, the Community Manager at Microsoft’s Game Technology Group, has also launched a new XBox focused blog using CS 2.1. Dave’s site is at LetsKillDave.com. I love that domain name!

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With all the other Microsoft news this week, one really cool announcement I haven’t heard much about yet is the unveiling of a public API for the MSDN2 library. Craig Andera has lots of info about it in his blog, and has published the first application to use the new services. Of course since he wrote it, I guess he had a bit of a head start. =)  No doubt we’ll find MSDN content spread far and wide as developers start thinking of interesting ways to use the API.

How about creating a Community Server job to grab MSDN content for certain topics and add it into blog posts, like the new blog mirroring feature in CS 2.1 does. Then you could have comments and better search (Enterprise Search). Or a CS Module to auto-generate links to relevant MSDN topics based upon tags/keywords in a blog post?