Do you often have people ask you for advice about technology, or do you write tech-focused blog or newsletter?  Here’s how you can get information to share with your readers about Microsoft technology with Microsoft Broadcaster.

Microsoft Broadcaster is a new service from Microsoft to help publishers, bloggers, developers, and other IT professionals find relevant information and resources from Microsoft.  You can use it to help discover things to write about, or simply discover new information about the technology you use.  Broadcaster will also notify you when new resources are available about the topics that interest you.  Let’s look at how you could use this to expand your blog and help your users.

Getting Started

Head over to the Microsoft Broadcaster site (link below), and click Join to get started.

Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new account if you don’t already have one.

Near the bottom of the page, add information about your blog, newsletter, or group that you want to share Broadcaster information with.  Click Add when you’re done entering information.  You can enter as many sites or groups as you wish.

When you’ve entered all of your information, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.  Broadcaster will then let you know your information has been submitted, but you’ll need to wait several days to see if you are approved or not.

Our application was approved about 2 days after applying, though this may vary.  When you’re approved, you’ll receive an email letting you know.  Return to the Broadcaster website (link below), but this time, click Sign in.

Accept the terms of use by clicking I Accept at the bottom of the page.

Confirm that your information entered previously is correct, and then click Configure my keywords at the bottom of the page.

Now you can pick the topics you want to stay informed about.  Type keywords in the textbox, and it will bring up relevant topics with IntelliSense.

Here we’ve added several topics to keep up with.

Next select the Microsoft Products you want to keep track of.  If the product you want to keep track of is not listed, make sure to list it in the keywords section as above.

Finally, select the types of content you wish to see, including articles, eBooks, webcasts, and more.

Finally, when everything’s entered, click Configure My Alerts at the bottom of the page.

Broadcaster can automatically email you when new content is found.  If you would like this, click Subscribe.  Otherwise, simply click Access Dashboard to go ahead and find your personalized content.

If you choose to receive emails of new content, you’ll have to configure it with Windows Live Alerts.  Click Continue to set this up.

Select if you want to receive Messenger alerts, emails, and/or text messages when new content is available.  Click Save when you’re finished.

Finally, select how often you want to be notified, and then click Access Dashboard to view the content currently available.

Finding Content For Your Blog, Site, or Group

Now you can find content specified for your interests from the dashboard.  To access the dashboard in the future, simply go to the Broadcaster site and click Sign In.

Here you can see available content, and can search for different topics or customize the topics shown.

You’ll see snippets of information from various Microsoft videos, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, and more, depending on your settings.  Click the link at the top of the snippet to view the content, or right-click and copy the link to use in emails or on social networks like Twitter.

If you’d like to add this snippet to your website or blog, click the Download content link at the bottom.

Now you can preview what the snippet will look like on your site, and change the width or height to fit your site.  You can view and edit the source code of the snippet from the box at the bottom, and then copy it to use on your site.

Copy the code, and paste it in the HTML of a blog post, email, webpage, or anywhere else you wish to share it.  Here we’re pasting it into the HTML editor in Windows Live Writer so we can post it to a blog.

After adding a title and opening paragraph, we have a nice blog post that only took a few minutes to put together but should still be useful for our readers.  You can check out the blog post we created at the link below.

Readers can click on the links, which will direct them to the content on Microsoft’s websites.

Conclusion

If you frequently need to find educational and informative content about Microsoft products and services, Broadcaster can be a great service to keep you up to date.  The service worked quite good in our tests, and generally found relevant content to our keywords.  We had difficulty embedding links to eBooks that were listed by Broadcaster, but everything else worked for us. 

Now you can always have high quality content to help your customers, coworkers, friends, and more, and you just might find something that will help you, too!

Link

Microsoft Broadcaster (registration required)

Example Post at Techinch.com with Content from Microsoft Broadcaster