Its appropriate to post this in March, the windy month, though the changes in this blog have been in the works for some time.

A combination of things, including my more active roles with both Twitter and The Hard Copy Observer, have led me to de-emphasize my blogging here. I am far from shutting down however, as my monthly Observations will continue to appear here as well as in the Observer, and my Tweets (on the right) are always visible here, and Ive found that Twitter is a good substitute for much of what Ive done here for four years, which is highlight interesting printing-industry and tech develops, and then comment on them. My Tweets still have all those links, though often my comments are of necessity a bit more brief!

Beyond my monthly column, I will continue to post other things occasionally too, such as my well-read quarterly HP printer industry metrics.

It was back March 2006 that I started this blog in earnest (backfilling with Observations columns going back to December 2005), and over 700 posts later, Im looking forward to continuing at a more modest pace.

Thanks readers and glad to get this out before April Fools Day!

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The recently announced Microsoft Bing search engine, announced just the week before last, is making some good headway, according to comScore numbers as reported by TechCrunchs Robin Wauters (see "comScore Study: Bing Is Off To A Very Good Start").

A Statcounter study reported last week that Bing searches (when combined with other existing Microsoft Search sites) had even surpassed Yahoo! for at least a day, and even at this humble blog, Microsoft searches have recently approached double-digits, though still far behind Yahoo! and king-of-the-hill Google.

While its easy to fall prey to the thinking Microsoft generally has lost its marketing (and execution) touch that often was felt even in the printer business, it seems things are off to a good start with Bing. (Confession -- I fell for the cynics view when my first page load of the Bing site came up with the old "Live Search" page last Monday.) And as Wauters points out:

But boy is it good to have some real competition in search going, even if just for a short while.

I couldnt have said it better!

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