Market Sentinel met the great Robert Scoble at the Texas Embassy do on Tuesday night. The room was full of 118 bloggers drawn from all over the UK and further afield. Scoble, who was there with his wife Maryam en route to Denmark, talked a little bit about his situation at Microsoft, the launch of Channel 9 (which is a kind of multimedia communications channel/extranet) and the general business of being a licensed voice of editorial freedom inside an organisation with a reputation for having a closed culture. This is what he said:

‘I want to be sure that never anthing between you and me. I type 80-100 words a minute. I never check spellings. (That’s my advice to bloggers, by the way, learn typing!) I hardly correct a thing. Obviously I know there are certain things I need to be careful about. Anything about new products I have to run by the lawyers first. For example if I happen to leak out something about the RSS aggregator [he winks] I know I will be in trouble. But because we are a rich company the lawyers expect someone to get sued. I mean, we now have 1500 people within Microsoft blogging. That’s just the risk we take. I know that there have been been people in Microsoft who have wanted to have me whacked for what I have written. But I have good protection from the top management. They like what I am doing. Steve Balmer [Microsoft COO] is telling the lawyers: stay away. He is telling the PR team: stay away.’

How does Scoble relate to the corporation that (after all) employs him? ‘I know that I am taking a risk when I say I disagree with Ballmer. For me corporate culture is like a membrane. You can push it so far and it pushes back. If you push too hard – like Mark Jens did at Google, it pushes you right out. Fortunately the membrane at Microsoft is pretty flexible at the moment.’

Later on we asked him how he got started. He worked for Dave Winer’s company, and then made himself redundant when the company couldn’t afford to pay him. Then he sold a Sun box to a senior Microsoft executive, impressed the guy and got hired as ‘a technical evangelist’. ‘We stole the name from Apple,” he added. “We steal everything cool from Apple [winks].’

Scoble had been blogging from the first, so it made sense for him to continue to blog, this time talking about his new job and gradually making the transition into being the trusted voice of Microsoft. He is writing a book on business blogging with Shel Israel.

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