Blogs and Email Go Head-to-Head at Microsoft

Kevin Briody, who manages Microsoft's academic developer effort to reach US college students, is trying an experiment. His group launched MSDN Student Flash, an e-newsletter for college student developers. They have published three issues and are ramping up to 2x/month. Overall the newsletter is getting a positive reaction. At the same time they also created the MSDN Student Flash blog and invited a couple students in to help write it. Why do both? Briody lists four reasons:

• To give students a choice on selecting how they like to get news from Microsoft
• To make all the content available via RSS feeds
• To have a realtime conversation rather than a staid one-way communication.
• To experiment and find out which format students prefer

For more on Kevin's analysis, visit his blog. (Via Scobleizer's Link Blog)

Comments

[John Dowdell]

Hmm, thanks for the tip on that "Microsoft StudentFlash", so that students have a better look inside the company. It did confuse me a little at first, though. Maybe I should recommend a similar thing here, although with a different name... "Macromedia StudentWindows", howzat sound...? ;-)

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support