Dwight Silverman, of the Houston Chronicle, says shame on Microsoft for calling the publishing mechanism inside the new URGE music service and Windows Media Player 11 (which otherwise is getting good reviews around blogs this morning) "blogs."

I agree with Dwight.

What made blogging better than Web sites? Five things.

1) Ease of publishing.
2) Discoverability. (Pings weblogs.com or technorati or another ping server).
3) Conversationality. (Trackbacks or as-they-happen referer logs, or now being part of Technorati and other blog search engines).
4) Linkability. (All posts should have permalinks).
5) Syndicatability. (All content should be available in RSS feeds).

If you don't have those five, you shouldn't call your stuff a blog. Especially if I can't link to it from here.

Awesome. One Microsoft team heard my pleas for clean XHTML. By the way, the new Word 2007 has the ability to post to blogs built in. Joe Friend has been writing about it.

Lots of Microsoft program managers push back and say "normal people don't care about HTML quality."

That might be true (although we all hate it when our pages don't display right on all browsers, or when they are slow to load) but the influentials who write reviews and tell their friends (or set up their computers) do care about such things.

One guy told me "but we have 10s of millions of users already, so why should we care?"

Well, you woulda had 10,000,001 if you had clean HTML. 🙂

Hey, Fred, can you give me some advice? (Read his post to understand that that's how he says to start a conversation with a venture capitalist).