Now that Bill Gates has said he's got a big eye on blogs, I thought of one way Microsoft can profit here and perhaps get a leg up in the search biz as well. It's in "the context of order." I came to realize this as I near the end of day two of my all-blog "media diet" experiment. Using blogs as my sole news source, I feel that I am staying fairly current. However, what I really crave is the "context of order" that blogs lack. This is where Microsoft can win with smart technology.
When we read a newspaper, many of us know that the top story of the day is often at the top right hand part of the front page above the fold (if it's a broadsheet) or on the front cover (if it's a tabloid). The same holds true for commercial news sites. The most important stories are listed at the top. Even Google News does a fairly good job giving the greatest credence to the most important stories of the day.
The problem with blogs - and even tools like Blodex, Popdex and Daypop that measure relevant citations - is that there is no real "context of order." It's impossible for me to tell which stories are truly more important than others. They're all listed chronologically at the blogger's discretion. If someone is relying solely on blogs for news, it's up to him/her to decide what's most important. There are pros and cons here. On the pro side readers prioritize the news themselves based on their own dispositions and interests. The big downside is that we lose the greater context that journalists can provide...unless Microsoft can help.
Microsoft's opportunity is to make easy-to-use weblog publishing tools that are sophisticated enough to enable a user to assign importance to posts using templates, fonts, headline sizes and, most importantly, order. The next step is then to develop a search tool (perhaps already in the works) that can automatically aggregate blog posts by the importance assigned by their publishers.
If they don't, then maybe Google or Yahoo will.
