The other day Steven Sinofsky, and the Windows 8 crew by proxy, broke cover with the first blog post about Windows 8 on the new Building Windows 8 blog, and now today we get another follow-up post from Sinofsky that outlines how they want the new blog to be used.

Sinofsky says early in the post that the Building Windows 8 blog is all about communication that goes both ways, and that he and the Windows 8 team have been digesting all the comments and emails that resulted from his first post. He also goes on to make it quite clear that this blog is 100% engineer written, and that there are no ghost-writers or that it is not meant as a marketing vehicle. He also promises that there won’t be any attempts to sanitize the words from team members.

As Sinofsky points out though – this is a two way conversation and that our comments are an important part of that conversation:

We had a long discussion about how to handle comments for Building Windows 8 (“B8”). Our experience with the Engineering Windows 7 blog (“E7″) comments was mostly positive, but a non-zero number of folks abused their direct access to both email and comments. Let’s keep the comments in the spirit of the community and avoid using comments for unrelated topics.

Of course, the primary goal of this blog is to have a two-way dialog, so comments are an important part of what we’re looking for with our blogging efforts. So we opted for the commenting mechanism already used by thousands of MSDN blogs—anonymous comments are permitted, and they appear without moderation. This blog platform employs some minor security measures and a spam filter that we do not control.

That means we are seeking out comments. Everyone on the Windows team will be watching for comments and is looking forward to the dialog. When participating, we will work to make sure Microsoft employees represent themselves as such, especially indicating if they work on the area Windows being discussed. We ask that press (those that write, blog, tweet professionally) identify themselves accordingly as well.

Of course there are the usual rules about what does get edited, or deleted:

• Offensive or abusive language or behavior as determined by a community standard
• Misrepresentation (i.e., claiming to be somebody you’re not) — if you don’t want to use your real name, that’s fine, as long as your profile name isn’t offensive, abusive, or misrepresentative
• Repeatedly posting the same comments or agenda, or attempting to fit a specific topic into every post, no matter what we blog about
• Blog-spam or link-abuse of any kind

Here’s hoping they keep with those ideals.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]