Normally I find Jeremy Zawodny, who works for Yahoo! interesting to read, but not when he writes posts like this one which just rings with petty contempt that should be way beneath him (bad hair day?): Blogging The Microsoft Way:

I haven’t said much of anything yet about MSN Spaces, but it’s been amusing to watch the reaction to their lame attempt at censorship of blogs. Even Scoble is joking about it, but I’m surprised he doesn’t talk about what a dumb decision that was (the lame attempt at censorship.)

What is Jeremy’s big problem with Microsoft and why does he have to sound like such an ass about it? So I wrote a response in the comments section taking him to task over his rather obvious non-objective point of view on the subject by displaying a recent example of non-beta software from Yahoo! that also has issues. He responded by saying:

As for bugs in Yahoo betas, thanks for the sarcasm. I’m more than willing to point out bugs in our non-beta software, let alone betas. See my post on blogs in the yahoo directory before you accuse me of being one-sided or something.

C’mon Jeremy, you are smarter than this. Microsoft is catering to children with these new MSN Spaces blogs also, not just adults, which Boing Boing and CNET don’t seem to acknowledge in their mockery of the serious subject.

When it comes to children, there are rather obvious legal concerns, which seem to make perfect sense to me in regards to the filters and such, at least until they get some sort of mature filter in place that actually works (and we could all argue as developers that word filtering sucks for the most part — just look at how most spam filters are subverted), so I can understand where Microsoft is going with that. But in the meantime bloggers (and CNET too, I guess) are just sensationalizing this censoring angle to stroke their readers. It’s like, oh we need to write more M$ sucks stuff because heaven forbid the death star could never come up with anything creative and/or useful. Personally, I’m tired of reading Microsoft sucks banter like this and said it better here: Microsoft: jealousy, brilliance or evil?

Look at the good things they’ve done with MSN Spaces so far: they support RSS 2.0 out of the box (instead of only Atom like Blogger), they have trackbacks (woo-hoo!), they make it easy to integrate with Windows Media playlists and their MSN music store as well as sharing pictures. There are also some neat hacks like the raw HTML hack.

Alas, blog entries praising stuff don’t get as much interest as negative blog entries, it seems. So instead let’s kick their ass for the censorship and a questionable line of text in their EULA. Maybe the reason that line of text you italicized, Jeremy, is there because they want to use quotes of people’s blog entries to feature on the home page of spaces.msn.com and don’t want to be sued for copyright infringement? It wouldn’t be the first time someone sued Microsoft. Why does this licensing have to be assumed as some type of nefarious, corporate evil scheme?

You can follow along with the developer blogs that Scoble listed and you’ll see the same conversations I’m reading, right from the developers themselves. I also have some of these folks listed in my blogroll at my MSN spaces blog in case you don’t know where those blogs are located.

Finally, I didn’t accuse you of anything, Jeremy, but were you feeling guilty after writing this blog entry or what (so you went and added the Yahoo! one next?)?

No, I simply drew parallels between two different big companies; one of which you work for and are understandably more sensitive about and another whom you don’t work for and don’t seem particularly fond of from your commentary (at times). Don’t take it so personally.

I think in most cases at your blog here you look at things objectively … just not in this particular blog entry though. Just my opinion, sorry. I am putting this here instead of the comments area of your blog entry. I will trackback it, accordingly.

Right now the biggest thing the MSN Spaces team needs to address is not the “overzealous” filtering, it’s the scaling issues. It’s like posting in mud sometimes and quite frustrating as a user who actually wants to use their service And this is coming from someone who doesn’t just want to use it for five minutes so that they can bash it on their blog.

• Retraction: MSN Spaces not enforcing nofollow on all blog authors
• Answering “What is trackback?”
• Google’s Page Rank, weblogs and the future
• MSN Spaces growing by 3+ million blogs a month
• MSN spaces out in the blogosphere (BETA)
• AOL Journals (blogging) is live!