Bill Gates’ recent Tech Ed keynote and Tony Chor’s follow-up blog announced that IE8 Beta 2 is coming in August. As the resident Microsoft man at BIMA I wanted to encourage people to start getting ready for IE8. What does this mean? Well there is a big drive with IE8 on web standards. As the IE blog says

What does “getting ready for IE8” mean for web sites?  IE8 displays content in IE8 Standards mode – its most standards-compliant layout mode – by default.  In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed how this aligns with our commitment to Web standards interoperability. However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of IE to display differently than intended. This creates a “get ready” call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in IE8

All the details are on the IE blog so I’d encourage you to go take a look there

It’s been a while since I posted but MIX08 gives me a good opportunity to jump back in here.

MIX is billed as a 72 hour conversation and is in its third year. It’s a very different event for Microsoft and attracts industry heavyweights from the Web 2.0 world, design community, press and more. Speakers included Scoble, Lou Carbone, Loic Le Meur, David Armano, Kevin Rose, Guy Kawasaki hand from Microsoft Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie.

So what went down? A lot….far too much to list here but here are some of the highlights

• IE8 beta 1
• Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 (with amazing demos including Hard Rock Memorabelia showing DeepZoom)
• Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview
• Expression Studio 2 Beta (contains Blend, Design, Encoder, Media and Web)
• Expression DeepZoom Composer

there was lots more but those are the highlights for the audience here. We also annoucned SQL Data Services which puts SQL in the cloud.

The highlights for me were the Hard Rock demo and the Guy Kawasaki intereview with Steve Ballmer – hilarious and stunningly open for the leader of Microsoft. Check it out now.

Check out http://sessions.visitmix.com/ for all sessions from the event (free) and don’t miss day one keynote.

Hold on to your bacon sandwiches!

We just finished the first BIMA Breakfast Bites session here in London where I talked about corporate blogging and Microsoft’s approach. Thanks to everyone who turned out for the event and I hope you enjoyed it. For those who didn’t, I’ll post soon about the content but basically I talked about how and where Microsoft has gone blogging and what I’ve learnt personally from it.

The Top 10 Tips I shared

1.Blog frequently

2.Be patient

3.Answer every comment

4.Don’t sell

5.Link. Link. Link

6.Traffic isn’t the goal, conversations is

7.Be Authentic

8.Expect criticism

9.Don’t blog when you’re drunk/down/angry

10.Blog Smart!

There were some great questions on stuff like how you build traffic, how you focus your blog, how we track blog usage etc. All in all a great morning, good crowd and pretty decent bacon sandwiches too!

Bonus Link: go to www.changethis.com for some great manifestos including one from Robert Scoble on blogging. More stuff on my own blog under blogging.

See you at the next one with my pal Hugh MacLeod

I’ll be giving the inaugural BIMA Breakfast Bites talk on Sept 21st at Soho House and hope to see you there – I mean, Soho House *must* do great bacon sarnies right?

Anyway, what can you expect from my talk? Well, hopefully something to keep you awake at this time on a Friday morning. I’ll be talking about blogging which may be tricky as I suspect everyone who attends probably has a blog but I thought it may be useful to give a perspective from Microsoft on how and why we blog – all 4500 of us which isn’t bad from a company of 80k employees. There was a great article in Wired a while back on how it all started and why it’s growing which is some of what I’ll discuss. I’ll also talk about the small project I have ongoing with my pal Hugh MacLeod which has become known as the Blue Monster. That’s Hugh up there holding up the image. Finally I’ll talk a little about why I think small companies can gain a significant advantage from blogging and hopefully leave you with 10 useful tips.

Get yerself registered – only 50 tickets available!

BIMA and Internet People hosted the first Top Cats event last week and it went down a storm. Even though I said to Chair Walsh I would only be able to stay for an hour, I stayed til the end as the venue, the crowd and the chat were all first class. There was a solid turnout and I think Thursday nights may be the best night for this as they appear to be the new Friday in town.

I met a whole new set of folks and as Paul had promised, it was a senior (not in age) gathering of agencies, influencers, tech folks and more with people from Vodafone, Accel, Top Table, Mook and more more there. No sign of Officer Dibble but perhaps next time. The first Top Cats was exclusively sponsored by Podcast Voices who ‘were the UK’s first dedicated audio and video Podcast Production Company so mucho thanks to them. Expect to see Microsoft sponsoring a future event! Look out for the next event in a months time or so. See ya there!