40 Days #2: Give the gift of Inside Xbox to the people
For what it's worth, one of the best features of the last dashboard update was the addition of the Inside Xbox news segment. The little glowing button that brings us news of the latest games, occasional game tips, and videos from Major Nelson and TriXie usually puts a smile on my face when I obsessively check it in the morning. Not so much because it is essentially a glorified advertising channel, but more because it's just so wonderfully cheesy with its look of a YouTube video produced by a few people in their basement. And I say that in the most complimentary way possible (although I am sure VideoMonkey might get offended at this comparison).
I think it's great to have a community channel that shows that gamers aren't dealing with a huge faceless corporation, but instead with regular folks like you and me, who sometimes look like they just rolled out of bed. Today I even found out that AceyBongos (the Xbox community manager for EMEA) is pretty funny in video form (as well as when visiting the Gamerscore Blog folks).
The problem with Inside Xbox - one that needs to be fixed as quickly as possible - is the disparity of content available to gamers in different regions. Folks in Canada recently got the new channel, joining gamers in the US, Japan, and the UK. But apparently UK gamers, for example, only get a text-based newletter-ish version of the feature (video content is supposedly coming soon). Other countries have even less - no news channel at all.
What Microsoft needs to do is hire a bunch of small 3-5 person teams to shoot content in multiple languages for at least the majority of the territories where Microsoft sells the Xbox 360. Even if it comes down to weekly shows consisting of things like new game spotlights, a few interviews with gamers from that region, coverage of local events like new game launch parties, and so forth. And I'm sure a few weekly pages of game tips and links to new Marketplace content can't be all that hard to translate, even if it's into a dozen languages or so.
It's just that Inside Xbox is such a nice personal touch that separates Microsoft from its competition - at least for right now. Nintendo, for example, is supposedly about to launch the US version of a similar feature as a Wii channel. Yet again, Microsoft has to be careful not to squander its momentum and leadership position in the goofy homemade video content area.