Monday, November 12, 2007

Content News: Glenn Close, Steve Gillmor and Microsoft's Office Live

There's content news all around this morning. Microsoft just announced the launch of a new blog for its forthcoming Office Live Workspace Community, Glenn Close has launched a blog of her own to support the dog products ecommerce site her family has invested in and the classic tech podcast Gillmor Gang has been sighted on Facebook.

Live Workspace Blog

Last month we covered some early screenshots of Microsoft's soon-to-launch online collaboration suite, Live Workspace. It's built on top of the desktop Office tools and in competition with Google Docs. It looks very nice and today the company launched a new blog to do all the things a company blog can do for a product. Two questions. Why is the video on the site posted in one of Google's YouTube video players? Second, where's the Google Docs community blog?

Glenn Close is a...

Actress Glenn Close is blogging at a new dog site called Fetchdog. It's a nicely designed site, aimed at a tiny part (high end, eco products) of a big niche market - dogs. Dogs are big, shopping is big and Glenn Close is big - sounds like a good combination. We'll see if the celebrity blog strategy can be sustained over time, I'd guess not. Speaking of things that aren't sustainable - for this ecologically attuned site to promote the sketchy world of dog breeders and purebreds is a real shame. There's a huge number of mixed-breed dogs left abandoned and bound for extermination in pounds around the country.

The Mystery Podcast Reappears

Speaking of celebrities who struggle to produce regular content, Steve Gillmor is back. A long time tech journalist and an esoteric visionary, Gillmor gets the all-star crew of the old Gillmor Gang podcast back together for a conversation about OpenSocial and so much more. Nick Carr, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and some enterprise guys who are fun too. Many people have missed the Gang a lot and hope that it resumes.

Where can you find the show? On Facebook, oddly enough. The beleaguered Podtech, Gillmor's employer for at least much of this year, isn't part of the picture. One way or the other, bring on the 90 minute, rambling, high-level conversation from a handful of elite industry thinkers. It's always been a great education and I'm not alone in wanting much more.

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