I am not a Microsoft fan, nor a detractor but their scobleizer-based PR is smart. There is a column in the economist about it.
Mr Scoble started blogging four years ago. At the time, he worked for NEC. (...) Mr Scoble used his blog to converse with NEC's customers, giving tech support and listening to feedback, with such disarming honesty that his blog became a must-read for gadget lovers. (...) This caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism”. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well”. But Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly. He realised that Microsoft, the target of similarly irrational fears, should have its own version of channel nine, and that public blogging by insiders should be an important part of it. (...)Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at. His blog—which he has kept outside of Microsoft's computers, and to which he usually posts in the wee hours after midnight—reads like a stream of consciousness. A reader might discover, for instance, that Mr Scoble's new wife just became an American citizen, or how to win a cheese contest. “A good blog lets you see the mess; lets you see behind the scenes,” he writes in one entry.
Why do I blog this? It definitely seems a nice move for Google to go into maps, very relevant to their search engine business (locating stuff is important and it's a good add-on to 
It turned out that it's still ugly, dirty and useless.