Dare is just your average program manager, popular Microsoft blogger, son-of-the-former-Nigerian-president. When he recently bailed on his very popular blog, I had to follow up with him on the details.

We'll start with the easy question: how long have you been here and what are you working on right now?
I've been with Microsoft for six years, and right now I'm a PM on the contacts platform. Recently I worked on the initial platform for events.live.com, and then I worked on the What's New page on Spaces, which shows you what your friends have been doing on Spaces.

When I interviewed Mini-Microsoft a couple months ago, I asked him about his favorite MSFT bloggers, and he mentioned you. And then two weeks later, you quit blogging! What's up with that?
I work at Microsoft because I want to work on software that impacts millions and millions of people. I've been blogging since 2001, but I realized that my blog was making me less effective at building software.

The most obvious example is the time-sink. A lot of the stuff I write took time: I think about something, learn about something, and then I write about it … and I re-write it. That was part of what I liked about blogging -- having to explain something is a great way to understand it. I'd use my blog to say something like, "Hey, Google announced this Open Social thing." If I really understand it, I should be able to explain it to someone. And that's a significant time-sink. Not like crazy 40 hours a week, but it's still time when I'm not doing other stuff.

Then there's the lack of context with blogging. Readers have to project context onto what you've written, and one of the things I found out is that sometimes the blog would cause conflict where I wasn't intending to cause conflict. Especially working at Microsoft -- almost anything you talk about, there's someone at Microsoft who cares about it. I use Firefox, and then someone on the IE team would be like, "Hey, why are you using Firefox?" Or I'm searching the Internet and I use Google, and someone's like "Why aren't you using Live Search?"

At first that doesn't matter, but once my blog became quote-unquote "popular," it became like ... "Wow, this visible Microsoft blogger said this or that," and that started causing more friction than I wanted to deal with.

Finally, it came down to functions. It would have been cool if my job was market-y or if I was an evangelist, but having this pseudo-tech pundit reputation actually affected the way people thought of me as a technical person. There's a lot of baggage that comes with being a popular blogger and also a technical PM at Microsoft.

Interesting. So, I have to ask about the whole "Your dad was the president of Nigeria" thing. Do you take those "Most honorable friend, I am a Nigerian dignitary and I'd like your bank account number" emails personally?
What's weird about those is that I have to actually read them because I can't be sure. They could actually be legitimate mail for me -- I mean, I know Nigerian Senators and Governors who worked with my dad. So it's irritating because I actually have to read those emails to be really sure!