This morning we posted a very special interview on Channel 9 with Bill Gates. In this video interview, Charles Torre sits down with Bill Gates and they talk about everything from philantropy, the CSA role, competition with Google and platforms.

I believe this will go down as one of our greatest Channel 9 interviews of all time and with a little over 1600 videos produced to date, that is saying something. I’ve been lucky to be near Bill during some key moments during his move from Microsoft Full Time to the foundation and chairman of Microsoft. Definitely some stories stories in there that I’ll tell my grandchildren about.

The first one is when Charles Torre and I went over to interview Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on the day we helped announce the upcoming change. We had no idea going over to interview these guys what they were about to announce. After that interview was filmed Steve Ballmer asked if we would like to sit in on the official press announce.

We accepted the invite

Charles and I sat behind Melinda to watch the Bill and Steve announce the upcoming change. You could feel the emotions in that meeting, I saw the friendship in Bill and Steve. I saw Melinda as a proud wife. It was great to see her smile as Bill talked about Ray Ozzie and the upcoming work with the foundation. I love being able to see folks "just as people" and I suppose that is why I enjoy the work on Channel 9 so much. I believe 9 has been great in finally showing the human beings behind our products.

The next big moment was last weeks documentary on BBC News, The Money Programme. The BBC filmed an interesting documentary about Microsoft’s history, our challenges ahead and Bill’s transition to the foundation. In that documentary there were a few small moments, that if you look closely you can see me walking down the hall with Bill and his staff. To the annoyance of my family, I paused the TV, put it in slow motion and replayed continously.  He also makes a comment about the importance of Evangelism and while talking about Channel 9 says, "cool". We’ll take that endorsement. :->

Anyhow, fun times. Congratulations to Bill on an amazing career and for moving on to work that could have an even larger effect on the world.

Thanks!

Today we completed the deployment of Channel 9 Version 4.0. We’re still doing some final stabilization work that includes tweaking performance, but we’re on our way. This is a 100 per cent rewrite of the predecessor and has been a long time in the making.

A little over five years ago Channel 9 came on the air, some would say ushering in a wave of transparency for Microsoft and becoming a poster child for corporate blogging. It has been a wild ride the last 5 years and I count my lucky stars for being able to be a part of all this and to still be here. It was a dream to work with Lenn Pryor, Robert Scoble, David Shadle and Bryn Waibel and everyone contributed in their own special way to create a Developer Community that “we’d want to be a member of”.

On the platform side, the site was pretty basic and I think that was part of the charm.  We had forked a project that Rob Howard was working on over on the ASP.NET Team called ASP.NET Forums 2.0 and had ran with it. I still remember Rob calling me the morning we went live saying something like, “You went #$%# live with that? Awesome. Can we have your bug fixes, there were a lot of bugs you know in that build”. I think we sitll owe you that check-in Rob.

Channel 9 rapidly grew over the years in traffic and features. I suppose many folks probably don’t know that there have been four major revisions to Channel 9, in last 5 years. 

There were actually five version of Channel 9.  We had initially set out to align ourselves and document Longhorn and initially intended it to be ProjectLonghorn.com.  Some helpful “feedback” from Sanjay Parthasarathy had us change our ways and we took the project code name of Channel 9 as our brand. 

Take a look at the comp of the original site that didn’t ship, good design, but I don’t think it would have been successful. Too corporate and not a place I’d want to hang around.

About 18 months ago, we made a big bet and that was to create a network of communities like Channel 9.  Since then our very small team has launched Channel 10 for Power Users, 8 for students, Mix Online for the web and TechNet Edge for the IT Pro. Rapidly iterating on design and experience as we made our way. Channel 10 actually had 5 different homepage refreshes in the last two years as we worked to figure out the right flow for a corporate blogging platform. After much debate we standardized on a “river of news”. We affectionately call these sites The Evangelism Network.

As we launched the sites we standardized on a common code-base for all the communities. We wanted something that is localized, enables contributions from around the world, is a solid foundation as more and more Evangelism is happening “online” and allows to be a test bed of the latest Microsoft Developer Technologies.

It is worth mentioning that the team today, is still a dream to work with. Very lean, mean, hard working and folks I am proud to work with. Our content team has their name in lights everyday, publishing kick-ass media. Today though on this development milestone, I wanted to call out the folks that work tirelessly behind the scenes, day and night ensuring a world class stage for our Evangelists.

David, Erik, Duncan, Grace, Nathan and Sampy thank you for the drive to take Channel 9 live on 4 and along the way for launching Channels 8, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge.  Wow, what a team!

This will be the last long lead release from our team for some time ahead, now we’ll move to much shorter sprints and rapidly evolving and improving the code. I actually don’t think a day goes by now that we’re not shipping new code to the sites, which is awesome and creates a really fun atmosphere to work in.

It goes without saying that none of this would be possible without customers. Millions of people ever month visit our network and participate, that involvement allows us to learn, share and grow together.

Thank you.

Now on to version 6. Just kidding. :->

For the past five and a half years, I’ve been running DasBlog. It has served me well over the years and I’m really appreciative of Chris Anderson for giving it a start with BlogX and finally to Clemens, Omar and Scott for moving it along as DasBlog.

For quite some time  I have wanted to make a move to something that had more extensibility, better themes and more of a self service admin. I seriously looked at moving to WordPress, but wanted a .NET solution. (I just don’t have the time to learn PHP, even that might be a good experience).  I also worried about breaking over 5 years of links by moving to a new solution.

So what to do?

At Mix, I ran into Rob Howard and he sang the praises of his team’s new Graffiti CMS Product. I downloaded a copy before flying home to Mix and shortly into the flight home, got an instance of it running on my laptop. It really was that easy.

Graffiti is simple to setup, has plug-in support and even a scripting language known as chalk that allows you to do some pretty powerful things with your themes. Very nicely done.

To move this blog over from Dasblog to Graffiti, Jayme Davis and Scott Watermasyk of Telligent wrote a Dasblog importer. To preserve my Google juice and links, they created a Graffiti URL rewriting plugin for Dasblog.  That way all my posts 301 redirect to the new Graffiti based URLs. They plan to make these available in a future version of Graffiti, so all will benefit.

Thank you folks at Telligent. This is great.

Jon Udell joined our team this past year.  In a short period of time he has played a huge role in help shape the content and approaches we take in creating content for the Evangelism Network. (Better know as the network of communities including Channels 8, 9, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge.

Today Jon is launching a new Microsoft-oriented interview series called Perspectives. The show covers a variety of topics including robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. For the most part he’ll interview innovators at Microsoft and sometimes folks from academia and industry as a whole.

His first interview with Henrik Nielsen and Tandy Trower, explores the Microsoft Robotics initiative. It is worth noting that we’re trying a few new things with this series.  First, every episode comes with a written transcript and finally each interview is edited for flow and clarity. I know editing? Scoble would think this is blasphemis.

Great to see Jon’s new home out.  Check it out.

Demo of the year for music fans. Not just a demo, going live this week.

Hard Rock Cafe

So we’re down here at Mix and what has now become a tradition my team is providing real-time coverage of the event via Channels 9, 10 and Mix Online.

We’ll have something for everyone. All the cool demos and deep dives with the partners along with the keynote stream are on Mix Online. On Channel 9, for the hardcore Developers we’ll have deep dives with the folks who build the product. Finally on Channel 10, we’ve got a first look at Internet Explorer 8.

First Look: Internet Explorer 8

Mix is amazing event and has sold out again. Unfortunately, I know not everyone can go so hopefully our online coverage helps you feel plugged in.

For the total Vegas experience though from home, I’ll recommend depriving yourself of sleep too.  3-4 hours each night this week should be your maximum.

Follow the Buzz over on Twitter.

This was very fun to see this morning, both Channels 8 and 9 were on the homepage of Microsoft.com

I grabbed a screenshot to capture the moment. :->

Ok, this will hopefully go down as one of those announcements as, “Man, it is about time someone did this!”.  Tonight, over on Channel 8 Bill Gates is announcing Microsoft DreamSpark.

With DreamSpark on Channel 8 students can download Visual Studio , Expression and Windows Server. These aren’t limited editions or time bombed copies either, its the full meal deal.

Today, DreamSpark we are going live in 10 countries, including Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.  More countries to come online soon.

Hats off to Joe Wilson, Bruce Curling and many others on the Academic Team at Microsoft for driving this forward. Lots of blood, sweat and tears in a project like this.

It is a great week for students everywhere. 

Postscript: Follow along on TechMeme for more coverage.

We’ve had a number of new faces join the team in last few months. Max Zuckerman joined us to as Student Content Machine on Channel 8, Dan Fernandez is cranking with Channel 9 and Nic Fillingham is relocating from Singapore to work on Channel 10.

Guess what? 

We have room for one more.  Over on Duncan’s team we have an opening.  Come join the Microsoft team that works hard, plays hard and is changing how Microsoft connects with the community through social media.

So what are we looking for?

• Someone who probably fits in the middle (or slightly to the dev side) of your designer vs. developer gradient image…
• Someone who does mostly front end work, but can write .NET code
• Someone who, if asked to write a web page that uses AJAX to call a web service, retrieve JSON, render the results in Silverlight and then make the whole thing interactive using JavaScript would be able to say “no problem”
• Someone who cares about standards and semantic markup.
• Someone who’d like to live in Redmond and work on the next generation of features for Channel 9, Channel 10, Channel 8, VisitMix.com, and TechNet Edge

Is that you? 
Know someone who might be interested? 

If so, send me a tweet, drop me a line on Facebook or send an email and we’ll talk more.

We’re a small band of brothers and sisters creating cool online experiences, having fun and trying to show the world that Microsoft gets online community. Sort of like a Rebel Alliance living within the death star.

Come join us.

Man, what a wild ride the last couple of months have been.  As usual we’re going full tilt, building out the code that drives the Evangelism Network and the content that keeps people coming back for more.   

It has been a while since I’ve blogged about what’s going on in my life and there has been plenty going on at work and at home.  I figured I’d update you all about work, my life at home is pretty well documented thanks to Flickr and Facebook.  Thanks for the nudges folks, let’s see if I can stay on the blogging saddle this time.

For those not following along at home, at work I lead the team that creates The Evangelism Network.  This is made up off five distinct communities for Microsoft, we have 8 for students, 9 for developers, 10 for technology enthusiasts, Mix Online for Web Agencies and TechNet Edge for the IT Professional. This of course all began with our first born child Channel 9.

I can honestly say that when Brynn, Charles, David, Lenn, Sanjay, Vic and I (always have to make sure I give everyone credit ) set out to create Channel 9, we never dreamt that it would result in a network of social media communities. We were just happy to get the site live.  Today millions of customers visit these communities to get the latest news from Microsoft and connect with their peers. It has been an amazing thing to be a part of.

One thing that has been equally rewarding (as much so as the early days of Channel 9) is watching the pieces of our code base that drives these sites come together. As I’ve blogged previously, we started a build out last spring of the Evangelism Network code. We started basically from the ground, using the code we wrote for Channel 10 as the base.  The goal being to create something that is simple, localized, scales and is instrumented. We also created a set publishing tools that handle encoding, workflow and uploading to our content delivery network. Last, but not least we wanted a templating system so all sites could look different, as necessary.  We really didn’t want the sites to be cookie cutters. 

The great news is, we now have Channels 8, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge all running on the same code and our publishing system is alive.  You can’t imagine how nice it is to have the ability to have bug fixes shared across all these sites. The Evangelism Network grew up pretty organically, so prior to this we actually had four separate versions of the code running. Its a big deal for us as all, to have these now unified as we’re a real small team.  I consider myself very lucky to have such a great development team behind all of this with Duncan Mackenzie, Erik Porter, David Shadle, Mike Sampson and Grace Francisco all pulling together to make it happen. 

So what about 9? When is it getting the big update? We’re close, so close we can taste it to having 9 moved over as well. Not ready to give the exact date yet, but it will be soon.

On the content side, things are going well too. I often tell our team that Rocketboom got away with a white HTML page and an embedded Quicktime player, so if we’re doing this investment in infrastructure our content better be amazing. The last month I think has been our best month ever for content on the Network, it really feels like we’re firing on all cylinders in the content department.

Some of my favorites pieces of content recently have included This Week on Channel 9 series which is a weekly show highlighting industry news and key moments from that week’s Channel 9 interviews, Tina’s what life at Microsoft is really like, a TechNet Edge piece on how to measure your PC power consumption, Max building a PC and finally Nishant’s sitt down with Kirupa Chinnathambi who runs the hugely popular Flash and  web development community named after him.

So lots going on, plenty more news to come. Let’s see if I can go a week without blogging.