Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ozzie starts blogging (again)

For being a social-networking fan, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie hasn't been big on sharing publicly via blogging or Twitter.

His first new post is notable on a couple of fronts. Ozzie used his "I'm back" post to reminisce about an "artifact" he stumbled on recently -- a folder of collateral from the Windows 1.0 launch event. He scanned the materials and posted them to a shared Docs.com site, where anyone can peruse them. (Ozzie also has posted his famous "Internet Services Disruption" memo that he wrote shortly after he joined Microsoft in 2005, as another shared document on the new blog.)

Ozzie noted that November 20, 2010 is the 25th anniversary of Windows. (Next week also marks the one-year anniversary of Windows 7, by the way.)

Ozzie's latest pet project is Docs.com, which is a mash-up between Facebook and Office Web Apps that Microsoft introduced in April, 2010. On October 14, Microsoft added a new feature to Docs.com -- browser-based PDF reading support.

Today's Docs.com update also includes the addition of "full text document search with social document ranking." (English translation, as explained by the FUSE Labs folks working on Docs.com: "Searching docs.com for 'Economics' will now reveal not only all documents tagged with the term, but all docs containing 'economics' as well.) Other additions: New user-generated templates functionality and a bulk Silverlight document uploader.

The Docs.com folks are hardly the only Microsoft team working closely with Facebook engineers. Yesterday, Microsoft and Facebook unveiled new social-search features that are coming to Bing and Facebook that the two developed together.