Having wisely ignored my questionable advice to relieve himself of the burdens of anonymity, the "Mini Microsoft" employee blogger has expanded beyond his blog to start posting on Twitter — after overcoming some apparent attempts to squat on his name. Fortunately for him, "Mini" has almost as many alternative monikers as Microsoft’s Live Search does, so you can follow him @whodapunk.

Twitter could be good for him.

For anyone unfamiliar with this whole Mini Microsoft thing, the unidentified Microsoft employee writes a blog with the mantra of slmming down the company into "a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine."

I think of him as the Redmond company’s version of a newspaper ombudsman. Microsoft’s employees are the readers phoning in their complaints, and its executives are the editors hoping the whole thing will just go away.

"Mini" at his best is the voice of reason, blunt with his criticism but seeming to have the best interests of the company at heart.

At the same time, Mini Microsoft in full blog format can be a little much to take. It’s tough sometimes to sort through all the anonymous comments on his blog to figure out what might be real and what probably isn’t, who’s posing as an employee and who actually is one. The volume and ambiguity can be overwhelming.

Exchanges on Twitter, on the other hand, promise to be more like listening to him talk one-on-one to people in a coffee shop. The chances of gleaning something meaningful from the conversation would be much better, assuming he really gets into it.

In any event, it should be interesting to see where this goes.

READ MORE and COMMENT, more 
and The Tragedy of the Commons  

Glenn Kelman: For a week or so last month, it was very fashionable around here to mourn the death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Bars and theaters posted "Seattle PI, RIP" on their marquees, even though to my way of thinking the PI did not so much die as resurrect itself, as one of the first newspapers to embrace an all-digital future.

Now the mob is up in arms about the clumsy, desperate efforts of two other news organizations, News Corporation and The Associated Press, to try making money in this all-digital future, by charging Google for displaying their headlines and opening paragraphs on its wildly popular portal, Google News.

In a post that TechCrunch yesterday called a "beautiful rant," Danny Sullivan compares dying news organizations’ efforts to be paid for their own content to the tribute levied by Viking pirates threatening rape and pillage.

Arguing that "arrogant" traditional media are no more objective or thoughtful than blogs, Sullivan begins his essay by telling the editor of the Wall Street Journal: "Robert… shut up. Seriously, shut up."

It seems clear that we all want newspapers to die like a Mohican in a James Cooper novel — nobly and quietly — without realizing how much any web-based business has in common with the Mohicans.

Why can’t we face the truth? Distribution technology has far outpaced the business models of many of the folks who create all the stuff on the Internet, and that newspapers are probably just the first of many victims, closely followed by books, music and television.

Google is the Viking Here (Even If It’s Mostly a Nice, Good Viking)

I for one have a hard time seeing Google, the primary gateway to the entire Internet, as the victim of a Viking rape-and-pillage raid. Or a handful of old media companies who have laid off thousands despite doubling or tripling their audience — as the Vikings.

 more