For those who remember reading Jon Udell in InfoWorld back when everyone in tech read big, ad-laden trade journals, he’s leaping off the fading flower of print for the emerald green fields of the Internet.

In January, Udell will take a position described as evangelist with Microsoft. Although he will do some similar work to former MS blogger Robert Scoble, Udell will also keep on doing the things he’s always done at InfoWorld:

Over the years I’ve evangelized a bunch of things to the alpha-geek crowd: Internet groupware, blogging, syndication, tagging, web architecture, lightweight integration, microformats, structured search, screencasting, dynamic languages, geographic mapping, random-access audio, and more. There’s a purpose behind all this, and Doug Engelbart saw it very clearly a long time ago.

The augmentation of human capability in these sorts of ways isn’t just some kind of geek chic. It’s nothing less than a survival issue for our species. We face some really serious challenges. The only way we’re going to be able to tackle them is to figure out how to work together in shared information spaces. I’ve chosen to align myself with Microsoft because I think it has the scale, the resources, and the business incentive to help me empower a lot of people to learn how to do that.

But will he be critical of his new employer as Scoble was from time to time?

David Utter, Staff Writer, WebProNews