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Scoble Notes

<![CDATA[Steve Broback introduces Robert Scoble, calling him "an important PR asset" for Microsoft. Robert Scoble begins; explains that his birthday party was collected over the Internet, from the wine to the cook. “It seems like everything in my life is coming from the Internet.” MSN Spaces has 1.75 million blogs after a little more than […]

<![CDATA[Steve Broback introduces Robert Scoble, calling him "an important PR asset" for Microsoft.
Robert Scoble begins; explains that his birthday party was collected over the Internet, from the wine to the cook. “It seems like everything in my life is coming from the Internet.”
MSN Spaces has 1.75 million blogs after a little more than a month. [So far, that’s about a quarter of the blogosphere when MSN Spaces was introduced.]
He shows the original Weblogs.com site, “the root class of the blogosphere.”
What is a blog? To me it is just a Web page in reverse chronological order. If you try to get into it more than that, you get into [needless] arguments. [I couldn’t agree more. So, for a business blogging conference, one must wonder if there is really something different or if it is a publishing tool that is relatively recognizable. I don’t agree with Dave Weinberger’s assessment of the blogging v. journalism debate after listening to and participating in the IRC at the Weblogs, Journalism and Credibility Conference last week. He talked about journalists generalizing about bloggers, but I saw it going both ways—we’re too eager to paint others as an enemy. Blogspace is no more enlightened than any other system.]
On eBay’s first day in business, they had no traffic. But with blogging, pinging allows your new pub/business to be seen immediately. Someone with no traffic at all is being discovered by connectors or journalists who are sifting for new people or information.
In the old linking world, my site got good coverage because I was good at promoting it. But today, Google watches Weblogs.com and comes to your site. Today, as soon as you link to me I see you. It lets me discover who is linking to me and link back to them and have some sort of conversation. This is important to avoiding PR crises.
Robert’s journey of discovery is similar to the one everyone who takes the time to communicate discovers, but at a profoundly accelerated pace. Writers read and Robert found he needed—craved—reading others; he now has a legendary 1,300 blogs in his aggregator. The channels we use to communicate as writers are miraculous and the aggregator reduces the many channels into a single powerful one.
Robert’s aggregator crashes: “Hey, if Bill Gates can crash on stage, so can I.”
He apparently waits until 5 PM to start browsing blogs; the truth is blogging is extra and he has a full-time job at Microsoft. There is a representation of Robert in the market as a “blogger,” but the fact is he is a blogger who works at Microsoft. Interesting. He only reads sites that changed in the last 24 hours, so he “only needs to read 200 to 400 sites every night.” Sick, sick, sick.
I watched Howard Dean build this movement. I noticed that passionate political people were concentrating on the candidates’ blogs. Anyone who really cares about technology checks me out [names others, too]. Blogs are building concentrations of passionate people. The Blogosphere and the mainstream world are different and you only have to look out (from the stage) to see all the Apple logos to understand that this is a passionate world.
You’ll see the most passionate people who care about any subject on these blogs. That’s why journalists hang out there. They know that the most passionate people create things, invent things and change the world. Because of this concentration of very passionate people and the press watching them, when something happens here the journalists can spin it out into the mainstream.
Passionate people choose products. The cycle of time between when someone notices something to reach the mainstream is shorter and shorter. If a product sucks, the world is going to know about it within 24 hours. His “Scoblephone”—it’s not that I endorsed it, but that I talked about it and 15 people talked about that.
Why should I blog? Some folks say “There’s no ROI there.” Bill Gates spends a lot to go speak to 4,000 people at CES. Our developers’ conference has 750 attendees and costs millions of dollars. I get to talk to many times those audiences each day through my blog.
How to start a blog: Read 50 blogs for two weeks. Find blogs about topics you care about and read them. [This is analogous to the response to a young writer: “Read authors who speak to you.”]
If you are a plumber in Seattle and you’re the first to blog, you will benefit from Google’s search placing you higher in its results. Robert found a plumber that way recently.
Two things that make a good blog: Passion [how often you post and go to information sources, like trade shows] and authority [knowledge level and clarity]. He knows a guy who blogs on his Prowler [note: Scoble said the guy blogs, but there’s no evidence of a blog at the link he points to] and knows the rate of pay of the people who built it, the color of the factory floor and much more. “After a half hour of talking to this guy, I wanted to go buy one.”
My boss used to say “Don’t link outside our world. Don’t link to someone who is not a partner. But if someone comes along and links to everywhere, they are more authoritative.” When Robert looks for a plumber, he looks for someone who shares their knowledge in the public sphere.
He thinks the “No Follow” tag will help prevent giving Google juice to sites he doesn’t like. Now he can say things about a site without providing a pointer. [But, look, if you link negatively, it’s a negative endorsement. A couple years ago, during an emergent democracy happening, we came up with the idea of “votetags” that express positive, neutral and negative sentiment and Kevin Lynch built some of it last year.]
The sound of keyboard rain rises when he makes the PR suggestion: “Identify a connector and connect with them.”
“Now that we have blogging, word-of-mouth networks are more efficient. So it takes less time to build a movement.”
Then ensues a discussion of all the dumb reasons for not blogging. [Folks, if you have an opinion at home or in the international press, you’re going to be criticized…. Why shoot for small venues? Go for it.]]]>

5 replies on “Scoble Notes”

Marqui: Blog Business Summit
Weblogsky sponsor Marqui was also a cosponsor of this week’s Blog Business Summit in Seattle, and the Marqui folks were liveblogging the conference. Some highlights: In Robert Scoble’s keynote, he says that “blogs are useful because they reveal –…

Marqui: Blog Business Summit
Weblogsky sponsor Marqui was also a cosponsor of this week’s Blog Business Summit in Seattle, and the Marqui folks were liveblogging the conference. Some highlights: In Robert Scoble’s keynote, he says that “blogs are useful because they reveal –…