It is time to refocus the blogging mojo! Way back when, I purchased a copy of Radio from Dave Winer's company just to figure out what in the world Mr. Winer kept on talking about - orange buttons with XML and such. I knew quite well how to write HTML and manage my own web pages. Why would I need software to help publish all of that?

Well, Radio had some interesting ideas to it. First of all, the very good idea (security aside) of everything being run via a local web server installed as part of the software. Nice. You just navigate to various pages in your browser to manage your posts and your incoming feeds.

Incoming feeds? Suddenly, I was like Jack Skellington, running around enthusiastically asking: "What's this? What's this?" You mean I can subscribe to an interesting site and get updates quickly? Rather than have to bookmark them all and go through a litany of visiting and finding out what's new? Excellent.

Cool! I, like Jack, I came to my people and started to evangelize blogging and I touched base with Mr. Scoble and told him how wonderfully disruptive all this blogging could be for us at Microsoft.

But, like Jack, I didn't do a very good job getting people understandable enthused about my new passion. I should have stepped back and explained:

• The benefits to them in learning and using blogs, especially what RSS and blogreaders are all about.
• I probably should have pointed them to Dare's RSS Bandit as a starting point.
• The benefits to our customers.

It was quite the flashback for me to when I was at Intel Supercomputers in 1994 and evangelizing the web and HTML. Some got it, others did see the need or benefit at the time.

In the meantime, after the Radio blog got going I continually got upset with it. I didn't want the database on my computer. I at least wanted the ability to roam. What if I was at home and wanted to blog? I wanted some kind of replication up to a service and I wanted to be able to blog from any computer I happened to be on. When my work laptop had to be repaved due to a dead harddisk (I seem to have one of those die on my every eighteen months) and I lost my Radio data, I threw in the towel and started looking elsewhere.

That was about the same time Google bought blogger and then turned it into a free service that could publish to your own website (vs. just blogspot.com). So I started my low-key blog there. What other blogs do I have? Well, this one (which is more recent, to be used for technical and non-family friendly topics). There was another one on a domain I set up for real geeky discussion that just plain didn't go anywhere. There's the blog over at MSN Spaces. And the blog that came along with the Bloglines account.

I am also tangentially involved in the InfoPath team blog, but that was more getting it up and going and getting some strategic posts on there.

Anything else? Well, at Microsoft I have an internal blog on the http://blogs/ server but I think that was more for testing out the wonderful blogging solution implemented in InfoPath.

So, I'm enthused to focus more energy here after spreading so many seeds to the wind.