Having wisely ignored my questionable advice to relieve himself of the burdens of anonymity, the "Mini Microsoft" employee blogger has expanded beyond his blog to start posting on Twitter -- after overcoming some apparent attempts to squat on his name. Fortunately for him, "Mini" has almost as many alternative monikers as Microsoft's Live Search does, so you can follow him @whodapunk.

Twitter could be good for him.

For anyone unfamiliar with this whole Mini Microsoft thing, the unidentified Microsoft employee writes a blog with the mantra of slimming down the company into "a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine."

I think of him as the Redmond company's version of a newspaper ombudsman. Microsoft's employees are the readers phoning in their complaints, and its executives are the editors hoping the whole thing will just go away.

"Mini" at his best is the voice of reason, blunt with his criticism but seeming to have the best interests of the company at heart.

At the same time, Mini Microsoft in full blog format can be a little much to take. It's tough sometimes to sort through all the anonymous comments on his blog to figure out what might be real and what probably isn't, who's posing as an employee and who actually is one. The volume and ambiguity can be overwhelming.

Exchanges on Twitter, on the other hand, promise to be more like listening to him talk one-on-one to people in a coffee shop. The chances of gleaning something meaningful from the conversation would be much better, assuming he really gets into it.

In any event, it should be interesting to see where this goes.