I promised that I would be back.

I am.

It has been a very exciting time with Microsoft PDC week now here. One of the things that is new from my team is the PDC live event coverage.

On the homepage of the PDC Website, you are able to watch the day 1 and 2 keynotes live. We’ve also superimposed recent activity from Twitter alongside the keynote stream. This is one of my favorite parts of the experience.

For the breakout sessions where we go deep with technical content, we did a complete reset on the user experience. The PDC Session browser, in its new form should make it a lot easier to pick your sessions at PDC.

For those following along at home we will publish all keynotes and also the breakout sessions live within about 24 hours of them taking place. These will live on Channel 9, but you can use the PDC Session Browser to find them.

If you want the “unplugged” or “directors cut” as I like to call it of PDC, my Channel 9 team has about 35 videos going live with the folks behind all of the announcements. One of my favorites so far is Manuvir Das walking through Windows Azure and what is cool you can also see his breakout session too (TL47 - Lap Around Windows Azure).

Thanks everyone who made there way to PDC in Los Angeles and also those folks following along at home. If you have feedback on the live event coverage, please leave a comment.

See you online.

Apparently it is. :-) I'll be back soon, stay tuned. Meanwhile you can follow me on FriendFeed and Twitter.

This morning we posted a very special interview on Channel 9 with Bill Gates. In this video interview, Charles Torre sits down with Bill Gates and they talk about everything from philantropy, the CSA role, competition with Google and platforms.

I believe this will go down as one of our greatest Channel 9 interviews of all time and with a little over 1600 videos produced to date, that is saying something. I've been lucky to be near Bill during some key moments during his move from Microsoft Full Time to the foundation and chairman of Microsoft. Definitely some stories stories in there that I'll tell my grandchildren about.

The first one is when Charles Torre and I went over to interview Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on the day we helped announce the upcoming change. We had no idea going over to interview these guys what they were about to announce. After that interview was filmed Steve Ballmer asked if we would like to sit in on the official press announce.

We accepted the invite :-)

Charles and I sat behind Melinda to watch the Bill and Steve announce the upcoming change. You could feel the emotions in that meeting, I saw the friendship in Bill and Steve. I saw Melinda as a proud wife. It was great to see her smile as Bill talked about Ray Ozzie and the upcoming work with the foundation. I love being able to see folks "just as people" and I suppose that is why I enjoy the work on Channel 9 so much. I believe 9 has been great in finally showing the human beings behind our products.

The next big moment was last weeks documentary on BBC News, The Money Programme. The BBC filmed an interesting documentary about Microsoft's history, our challenges ahead and Bill's transition to the foundation. In that documentary there were a few small moments, that if you look closely you can see me walking down the hall with Bill and his staff. To the annoyance of my family, I paused the TV, put it in slow motion and replayed continously.  He also makes a comment about the importance of Evangelism and while talking about Channel 9 says, "cool". We'll take that endorsement. :->

Anyhow, fun times. Congratulations to Bill on an amazing career and for moving on to work that could have an even larger effect on the world.

Thanks!

archive placeholder host, for the graffiti archive plugin courtesy of John Sagara.

Today we completed the deployment of Channel 9 Version 4.0. We’re still doing some final stabilization work that includes tweaking performance, but we’re on our way. This is a 100 per cent rewrite of the predecessor and has been a long time in the making.

A little over five years ago Channel 9 came on the air, some would say ushering in a wave of transparency for Microsoft and becoming a poster child for corporate blogging. It has been a wild ride the last 5 years and I count my lucky stars for being able to be a part of all this and to still be here. It was a dream to work with Lenn Pryor, Robert Scoble, David Shadle and Bryn Waibel and everyone contributed in their own special way to create a Developer Community that “we’d want to be a member of”.

On the platform side, the site was pretty basic and I think that was part of the charm.  We had forked a project that Rob Howard was working on over on the ASP.NET Team called ASP.NET Forums 2.0 and had ran with it. I still remember Rob calling me the morning we went live saying something like, “You went #$%# live with that? Awesome. Can we have your bug fixes, there were a lot of bugs you know in that build”. I think we sitll owe you that check-in Rob.

Channel 9 rapidly grew over the years in traffic and features. I suppose many folks probably don’t know that there have been four major revisions to Channel 9, in last 5 years. 

There were actually five version of Channel 9.  We had initially set out to align ourselves and document Longhorn and initially intended it to be ProjectLonghorn.com.  Some helpful “feedback” from Sanjay Parthasarathy had us change our ways and we took the project code name of Channel 9 as our brand. 

Take a look at the comp of the original site that didn’t ship, good design, but I don’t think it would have been successful. Too corporate and not a place I’d want to hang around.

About 18 months ago, we made a big bet and that was to create a network of communities like Channel 9.  Since then our very small team has launched Channel 10 for Power Users, 8 for students, Mix Online for the web and TechNet Edge for the IT Pro. Rapidly iterating on design and experience as we made our way. Channel 10 actually had 5 different homepage refreshes in the last two years as we worked to figure out the right flow for a corporate blogging platform. After much debate we standardized on a “river of news”. We affectionately call these sites The Evangelism Network.

As we launched the sites we standardized on a common code-base for all the communities. We wanted something that is localized, enables contributions from around the world, is a solid foundation as more and more Evangelism is happening “online” and allows to be a test bed of the latest Microsoft Developer Technologies.

It is worth mentioning that the team today, is still a dream to work with. Very lean, mean, hard working and folks I am proud to work with. Our content team has their name in lights everyday, publishing kick-ass media. Today though on this development milestone, I wanted to call out the folks that work tirelessly behind the scenes, day and night ensuring a world class stage for our Evangelists.

David, Erik, Duncan, Grace, Nathan and Sampy thank you for the drive to take Channel 9 live on 4 and along the way for launching Channels 8, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge.  Wow, what a team!

This will be the last long lead release from our team for some time ahead, now we’ll move to much shorter sprints and rapidly evolving and improving the code. I actually don’t think a day goes by now that we’re not shipping new code to the sites, which is awesome and creates a really fun atmosphere to work in.

It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without customers. Millions of people ever month visit our network and participate, that involvement allows us to learn, share and grow together.

Thank you.

Now on to version 6. Just kidding. :->

For the past five and a half years, I've been running DasBlog. It has served me well over the years and I'm really appreciative of Chris Anderson for giving it a start with BlogX and finally to Clemens, Omar and Scott for moving it along as DasBlog.

For quite some time  I have wanted to make a move to something that had more extensibility, better themes and more of a self service admin. I seriously looked at moving to Wordpress, but wanted a .NET solution. (I just don't have the time to learn PHP, even that might be a good experience).  I also worried about breaking over 5 years of links by moving to a new solution.

So what to do?

At Mix, I ran into Rob Howard and he sang the praises of his team's new Graffiti CMS Product. I downloaded a copy before flying home to Mix and shortly into the flight home, got an instance of it running on my laptop. It really was that easy.

Graffiti is simple to setup, has plug-in support and even a scripting language known as chalk that allows you to do some pretty powerful things with your themes. Very nicely done.

To move this blog over from Dasblog to Graffiti, Jayme Davis and Scott Watermasyk of Telligent wrote a Dasblog importer. To preserve my Google juice and links, they created a Graffiti URL rewriting plugin for Dasblog.  That way all my posts 301 redirect to the new Graffiti based URLs. They plan to make these available in a future version of Graffiti, so all will benefit.

Thank you folks at Telligent. This is great.

Jon Udell joined our team this past year.  In a short period of time he has played a huge role in help shape the content and approaches we take in creating content for the Evangelism Network. (Better know as the network of communities including Channels 8, 9, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge.

Today Jon is launching a new Microsoft-oriented interview series called Perspectives. The show covers a variety of topics including robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. For the most part he'll interview innovators at Microsoft and sometimes folks from academia and industry as a whole.

His first interview with Henrik Nielsen and Tandy Trower, explores the Microsoft Robotics initiative. It is worth noting that we're trying a few new things with this series.  First, every episode comes with a written transcript and finally each interview is edited for flow and clarity. I know editing? Scoble would think this is blasphemis. :-)

Great to see Jon's new home out.  Check it out.

Demo of the year for music fans. Not just a demo, going live this week.

Hard Rock Cafe

So we're down here at Mix and what has now become a tradition my team is providing real-time coverage of the event via Channels 9, 10 and Mix Online.

We'll have something for everyone. All the cool demos and deep dives with the partners along with the keynote stream are on Mix Online. On Channel 9, for the hardcore Developers we'll have deep dives with the folks who build the product. Finally on Channel 10, we've got a first look at Internet Explorer 8.

First Look: Internet Explorer 8

Mix is amazing event and has sold out again. Unfortunately, I know not everyone can go so hopefully our online coverage helps you feel plugged in.

For the total Vegas experience though from home, I'll recommend depriving yourself of sleep too.  3-4 hours each night this week should be your maximum.

Follow the Buzz over on Twitter.

This was very fun to see this morning, both Channels 8 and 9 were on the homepage of Microsoft.com

I grabbed a screenshot to capture the moment. :->