You seemed to have freedom to speak your mind at Microsoft. Did you feel supported by senior management?

Absolutely. They understood the importance of having a guy seven levels down talking to customers. I never had anything that I posted killed at Microsoft, but I got yelled at for a few things. When I first wrote about legal issues I was told that it's really dangerous to get close to. They said, if you get close, you'll get subpoenaed and spend six months in a courtroom. They knew from experience on that one. I touched it a few times, but I knew that risk. That kind of stuff is like being a gold miner, and using dynamite on the job. Dynamite is dangerous, but you need it to get the gold.

What companies are leaders in using blogs and similar new technologies?

In terms of the quantity of bloggers, I think it's between Sun, Adobe and Microsoft, with Microsoft in the lead. I like the executive blog that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has. General Motors has a public relations feel to their blogs, but they are using them as well.

What does it mean for a company when a blogger who has been its public face leaves? And why did you leave Microsoft, anyway?

Take care of your employees so they don't leave [laughs]. My son is down here in Petaluma [Calif.] and my wife and I were flying from Seattle every other weekend to see him. That took a toll on us. We were looking for opportunities to be closer to him. Even if I had moved to Silicon Valley with Microsoft, I would have been making so many trips back to Redmond that the problem would have still been there.

You'll always have employees leave, even if you are the best of companies. It's the same as when an executive leaves, or a head engineer, or a secretary who leaves with a bunch of knowledge about a company that is hard to replace. Turnover is something every company should worry about. I don't think it means you stop using bloggers. You would miss all the goodness that happen with blogss if you did. And a lot of that goodness stuck around at Microsoft. I mean, Channel 9 [Microsoft's multimedia site, where Scoble blogged] didn't lose all of its readers because I left. They have more than four million unique visitors a month now.

There's an impact on the blogger's own brand, too. What does leaving Microsoft mean for you, and for your successor there?

When you have access to something other journalists don't have access to, you can get attention. I have some access at PodTech, and I'm sure my blog will get interesting again.

I don't have one successor at Microsoft. I don't think I'd wish that on anyone. You have to have so many connections inside the company to funnel things through, it's hard to build that kind of relationship network, and it's just hard to be the public face of a company like that on an ongoing basis, without being tied into the inner core structure. Maybe an executive could do it, but it would be hard. The magic of search engines allows the blogging job to be distributed. The first hit on Google for "One Note blog" is for Chris Pratley, who runs the One Note team, and he is the person who should speak about it. I'm really happy that's what happened at Microsoft, that what I was doing grew across the company.

What's your new gig all about?

My formal title is vice president of media development at PodTech. I have two jobs. One is to do my own tech video show—this morning I interviewed the CEO of Wikia. [a wiki-community company co-founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales]. So 20 percent of my job is interviewing cool people about what they're doing, about their services, products and trends. But most of my time is going to be spent building a network of interesting video and audio bloggers, or content people, to create content for computers and iPods.

Next page: Google vs. Microsoft

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