Microsoft is gearing up to enter the blog search arena with a project named Blogbot. SeattlePI:

MSN exec Yusuf Mehdi showed it briefly on screen during a conference on the Redmond campus today, along with MSN Newsbot, a news search engine also in development.

MSN Newsbot is going to compete with news.google.com (which is running a long beta test). Lots of speculation in this article and some commentary from Feedster CEO Scott Rafer who “thinks it would be really good for our [blogging and RSS] business, frankly.” Adding that the reality that blogging is still something that isn’t taken altogether seriously by the financial world, despite involvement by high profile organizations (Google) and individuals (George Bush). Microsoft entering the fray can’t be bad because it will lend more credibility to the blogosphere as a whole. Mr. Rafer also added that he wasn’t that concerned and a little M$ bashing: “Microsoft as a brand is so unpopular with the core blogging community.” While this might be true of a sector of Linux and Mac heads only, the reality is that Microsoft competitors makes up a rather small slice in the OS pool and Microsoft — love them or hate them — dominates. The vast majority of people reading blogs are using Microsoft OS and the majority of bloggers are working on Windows OS machines. Any blogger can consult his/her favorite stats program for OS domination from their own traffic, I did for this blog and found the percentages to be: 94.28% Windows, 3.21% Mac, Unix 0.63 and Other 1.86%.

Microsoft says it’s too early to talk publicly about the technology the weblog-search engine will use. But it will be focused only on weblogs, leaving more traditional online news sources for the Newsbot service.

Only on weblogs, wow. I think this is cool that Microsoft is doing this too and wouldn’t be surprised if Google beats them to the punch by releasing a blog-only search (at least in beta first). Or perhaps something entirely based on RSS feeds, which includes content beyond only blogs. More evidence that blogs in 2004 are only going to continue to grow in popularity.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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