Do you love Microsoft?

Good question.

I subscribed to my first blog about a month ago - rather late in the day! I now have a feed viewer (after playing with freeware and shareware, I finally settled for Vienna, running on OS X) and subscriptions to around 150 feeds. So for the price of about 1 hour a day (which I hope will reduce as I get more familiar with current issues) I am becoming fairly well-informed in some areas (mainly related to technology) where previously I wasn’t.

I was already a news junkie and do not find blogs particularly useful for general political news - maybe I haven’t found the right ones yet.

So that explains why I am reading them (or more accurately that I am reading them), but why writing.

Well, I am in the proceess of setting up a new website business aimed at consumers and a blog will be part of it, so I wanted to get familiar with the process - both the technical issues of dealing with spam etc and the practical issues of producing new content on a regular basis.

I happened to have agreed to go on the UK committee examining OpenXML, so MS seemed like an obvious blogging topic.

But since my ultimate goal is a profitable site (in an entirely unrelated area) I am interested in how people monetize their sites. There is surprisiingly little material on this. The only blog I have found so far which deals with the subject directly is the Entrepreneurial Blog of Matt Huggins. He is currently running a promotion where you can win free business books and also receive a free link back in return for including the three links in this paragraph in your blog. The last of them is to his Make Money Blogging series.

So have I now hopelessly compromised my impartiality? I hope not. I do not see how I could have made the disclosure more explicit. Also, I liked his site and put it into my feed before this promotion came up!