Bill Gates on Blogs

Gizmodo pulls off a coup at the CES, snagging a sit down with Bill Gates, who says, among other things:

"Bill Gates: I think blogging is super-important and we've got to do a lot more software. The phenomena for us is we've got in beta this MSN Spaces thing, and it lets you leverage everything you do around Messenger�that's your buddy lists and those relationships�to set up blogs, and who has access, and who gets notified. We've got up over a million people [who] set up blog sites.
"Now, how many of those people keep those up to stay... but still, it's a very big number."

Overall it's been a good 2005 thus far for Nick Denton. Aside from the Gates coup, Denton beat out my old Silicon Alley Reporter boss, Jason Calacanis for Lockhart Steele, who becomes Managing Editor of Gawker (And, the most excellent Sac did a brilliant job providing the satirical commentary, of which this situation begs). According to Corante:

"In its list of the 15 people to watch in 2005, the Wall Street Journal has included online publisher Nick Denton. Is 2005 the year that blogging finally makes it big? We'll see: 'Mr. Denton is looking to prove that blogging can be a business, building a small but growing galaxy of publications. Mr. Denton, publisher of the Wonkette political gossip blog and others, has become the poster boy for blog start-ups, snagging big-name advertisers with help from his highly targeted audiences. Altogether, his eight blogs, which include Gawker (Manhattan gossip) and Gizmodo (gadgets), pull in a total of more than 29 million page views monthly.'"

Not bad accomplishments for just 12 days into the year. Cheers, Nick.