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State of the Blog – A Little Update on Where We Are Today

We are in an exciting time for Windows. We’re about to launch our best version of Windows yet – Windows 7. In between all the Windows 7 awesomeness, I wanted to take a moment to talk about The Windows Blog and where we are today with the site.

We’ve come a long way since 2006 when we launched as the Windows Vista Team Blog. This last fall we re-launched the site as The Windows Blog. When we re-launched, the focus of the site was to be the ultimate resource for Windows through the use of blogging – and to grow.

In the site’s design, we put an emphasis of multiple blogs existing under The Windows Blog “umbrella” that would cater to different audiences. Our original blog, Windows Vista Team Blog, became one of several blogs under that “umbrella” and we also launched the Windows 7 Team Blog which is where you will find all the latest Windows 7 news and announcements. Also in the fall, we launched the Windows Security Blog featuring blog posts focusing on Windows security from Paul Cooke. Paul blogged live from RSA earlier this year.

And in the last few months, we’ve grown quite a bit to cover a broader array of audiences with several other new blogs joining our site:

Windows for your Business Blog: Launched in February by Gavriella Schuster, this blog focuses on our commercial customers for Windows. Most recently, Rich Reynolds who is a GM on the Windows Commercial Marketing Team posted a blog about how our business customers provided early feedback for Windows 7.

Windows 7 for Developers Blog: At the end of March, we launched the Windows 7 for Developers. This blog is run by Yochay Kiriaty from the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) Team here at Microsoft. Yochay blogs about all the really cool things developers can do with their applications to take advantage of Windows 7 features like the new Windows Taskbar. If you’re a developer – this blog is a must read.

Springboard Series Blog: This blog launched in early June and is run by Senior Community Manager Stephen Rose. The Springboard Series is a TechNet portal and is the ultimate Windows resource for IT Professionals. The Springboard Series Blog focuses on calling out those resources for IT Pros. Just recently, a Virtual Roundtable (VRT) discussion was help with Mark Russinovich on Application Compatibility – check it out here!

Soon, my friends over on Windows Mobile will be blogging on The Windows Blog too! Their blog can be found here.

And of course I continue to focus on my Windows experiences on the Windows Experience Blog as well.

What’s great about growing the blogs under The Windows Blog “umbrella” is that we have blog posts talking about a variety of Windows topics relevant to a broad set of audiences.

However what if some of the content being blogged about isn’t relevant to me?

All blog posts from all blogs automatically appear in our main RSS feed. Some people want to see and read everything. This is likely how they are doing so or going to our frontpage. But if you only care about content from a specific blog, you can subscribe to the individual RSS feed for that blog. Here are the RSS feeds for each of the blogs here on The Windows Blog:

Tags we use for blog posts also have their own RSS feeds. If all you care about is our announcements, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the Announcements tag.

If RSS isn’t your thing, you can also follow The Windows Blog on Twitter and get all our latest blog posts too.

So what’s coming up for The Windows Blog? Well – lots more awesome Windows 7 blog posts of course. We’re also going to be introducing a new menu system in the coming weeks and introducing more new blogs – including some localized blogs in a variety of different languages.

I’m very proud of the community of Windows blogs we’ve built up here on The Windows Blog. Thank you to the millions of visitors who read our posts each month and continue to be excited for Windows!