Speaking at the Microsoft CEO Summit, Gates said that blogging, along with an update notification system called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), is an effective way of reaching people who might be interested in what you're writing about, but who you wouldn't necessarily email.
He acknowledged that there was a problem with people continually accessing websites that were not being updated, this could be overcome by using an RSS feed -- and that this combated the drawbacks of imposing on people with email.
He said: "What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an email, but it goes up onto a website. And then people who care about that get a little notification."
In the same speech, Gates said that this is the year that internet advertising has become mainstream, and that advances in hardware were leading to experiences never possible before.
He said: "You want to be up on the Web, whether it's some of the new ad formats, or buying search keywords. And the growth in Internet advertising was over 20%, and not at all fuelled just by technology companies buying from each other, which is what we saw in the late 1990s.
"Here, it's really mainstream, Madison Avenue type buyers, and a lot of great experimentation there to make that work and make it attractive to the users, as well."
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