Scoble’s feed is broken in Google Reader, it isn’t displaying line breaks and it’s making it almost impossible to read. It’s getting to the stage where I’m just about ready to unsubscribe cause of how annoying it is. Just thought I should give him the courtesy of letting him know.
Tag Archives: scoble
Over-Transparent
While reading Scoble’s recent post about The Long Tail and his previous posts about transparency it got me thinking about why people blog. Whether it is connecting to those people that are close to you and read your blog, people who are interested in the same things you are, or you are trying to make a business out of it. For mine, these things should all be factors of how transparent you are being.
In this case, Chris Anderson could well be sending the book as nothing but a gift to Scoble saying, thanks for being a good friend, yet, Scoble has still stated he is being paid for the post and is still going to give it away. What about if Robert’s brother was to give him a book he had written, would the his process still be different. I know if I gave someone a book as a gift, and they were to give it away because they considered it payment I would be offended.
Each to their own I suppose. All I am saying, is we need to not forget that blogging is a very personal medium, and the very process of trying to be transparent, can make the whole thing feel mechanical and soulless.
Advertising and Driving
Scoble is driving cross country, looking at the advertising and posting stuff to his blog, all at the same time. Being connected while your on the move sure sounds like a fair improvement over re-tuning into TripleJ every 2 hours. He got me thinking, how long is it going to be until we start seeing the online advertising crowd moving into roadside advertising. It’s not going to be long, as soon as Google (that’s short for web advertising industry) can figure out who is driving and when, and reduce the cost of realtime customizable ads. I’m sure we will see it.
Geeks like Robert are going to make this possible for them, because everytime his Cell phone hit’s Google, I’m sure they can tell about where he is on the road home. Being able to aggregate even some of this information, is where the money in free municipal wifi is.
Sooner or later, that parking lot that is Silicon Valley will just be a huge targeted advertising space.
Blogging’s Brazil Nuts
It has been said on many occasions that the blogosphere is an echo chamber. Whether it is or not, it generally brings good, new content to the eyes of many. This works because each person with a blog subscribes to a heap of blogs, and they point to interesting things they see. So, given a couple of iterations most people will have seen something pass through their aggregator.
This is very similar to the Brazil Nut theory where the smaller particles work their way under the bigger particles and push them to the top.
That’s all fairly obvious and elementary, until you add the meme-trackers to the frey. People start going to Memeorandum for their fix. This works by watching a certain group of bloggers and pointing to stories that start getting a little bit of traction. Problem is, that people like Robert Scoble who has been one of the best linkers start using the Meme tracker and stop reading the same content. In essence, he has only been linking to what has already worked it’s way to the top.
However if everyone who Memeorandum was watching, only watched Memeorandum, nothing new would ever be come to the top, unless of coursed it was produced by the memetracker’s list. In essence, this would be like having a jar of brazil nuts, with no peanuts to help bring the good stuff to the top.
So Scoble, thank you for trying to shake the jar and bringing the good nuts to the top again.
Zeldman and WordPress
So, Jeffrey Zeldman has moved his blog from hand-coding everything on the site every day, over to WordPress. This shows that the WordPress community is really moving in the right direction with the development. The other news here, that may be overshadowed is that he has also changed from summaries in his RSS feed, to full text. I bet Scoble will be happy.
Some thoughts about Scoble
I’ve moved my subscription for the scoble over to his new home. There’s a couple of things I want to point out.
- His writing has gone from alot of links and short comments to longer more comprehensive pieces. This isn’t good or bad, but it seems to me that the change to WordPress has something to do with it.
- His feed has changed and it doesn’t appear to be a fulltext feed in Thunderbird I’ve looked at the feed and I know the data is there, but I can’t see it. I wonder how many other people this is happening to.
Tablet PC’ s in Australia
I’m trying to get a demo of a Tablet PC in Brisbane and I’m hoping Scoble can weave some of his magic. It’s not for me it’s for my girlfriend who is studying graphic design. I’m sure it would be perfect for her especially for some of her art subject’s however I’ve spoken to just about every computer retail store in Toowoomba and a few around the Brisbane CBD with absolutely no success. Even if they have heard of them they have no idea where might have one in stock. She doesn’t want to buy one without seeing it and if she doesn’t see one soon she’s going to buy an Apple. Help!
Scoble’s credibility
Scoble has lost alot of credibility with me today. Looking at the times he has posted he has been active on his weblog at 2 separate times in the last day and hasn’t posted the biggest IT related news (IMHO) of the day. The release of Firefox. I should be giving him the benefit of the doubt, but the KoolAid really could be getting to his brain.
