Tag Archives: scoble

Twidiots of the World, Unite!

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Twitter, as the latest social networking fad brilliant microblogging innovation, is attracting a huge following.    The appeal of Twitter is hard to explain until you’ve actively participated for some time, but I’m finding it’s a very enjoyable distraction from more pressing concerns.     Not only can you eavesdrop on usually intelligent tiny written conversations going on all over the world, through the “following” and “followers” features you can filter those conversations and control what you see and send to others.    Arguably the most important feature is that you can link out to blog posts or other URLs of interest, making Twitter a way to filter the increasingly overwhelming stream of data a bit more coherently than otherwise.    Twitter’s most practical application is probably simply “keeping in touch” with others both when they are distant and when you find common ground (e.g. at a  conference).   Tweetups are real life meetings where people who gather online get together for real – usually at a conference or in a city such as the one scheduled for CES 2009 in Las Vegas.

Loic LeMeur, the very popular Seesmic Founder, LeWeb Conference Organizer, and Twitter guy suggested improvements to Twitter search that would rank the material by the *authority* of the person writing, and this sparked a nice debate about how to assign value to the massive and constant stream of human commentary at Twitter.     I didn’t like that idea:

NO.   I’m OK with Scoble’s approach but I think the search by “authority” will deliver the same problems we have now with blogging – the best posts about a topic are not generally surfaced by authority measures. Instead, we get the most algorithmically appealing posts which are usually either a product of old A list bloggers sticking together and linking very opportunistically or overly SEO’d posts that suck but do a great job fooling the algos. Mostly ranking is now a combination of those two factors (old stuff and SEO measures).

One of the *great* things about Twitter is that it limits exposure fairly democratically. Authority search will help the twitter “rich” get richer, but I hardly think that’s a noble objective – it’s the same problem we have now where early adopters with a superficial voice are elevated above quality journalists.

Unless I’m missing something it sounds like you and Mike want to make sure Twitter does not threaten the status quo with more democratic ranking. I think it’s a great idea. In fact I think it would be interesting to *reverse* the algo you suggest – I’d rather hear from some Grandmas in Peoria about their iPhone experiences than from Jason Calacanis about [groan] the wonders of Mahalo.


Mike at TechCrunch had a somewhat opportunistic take on the situation saying this was a fine idea.   I didn’t agree with him either:

Mike my beef with the idea is the notion that popularity or even authority *in any form* is something we should work hard to protect and promote. I’m tiring of a mostly regurgitated news stream and increasingly I want to know what Peoria is thinking as much as what Mountain View thinks.

Even though Peoria is rarely as interesting or well articulated or technologically sophisticated, it’s far more *representative* and if I’m looking for business ideas or social trends…I’d like to hear from Grandma as much as from you and Loic.

The game as it stands mostly retains the status quo and limits the debate. There’s a much better way and, collectively, I think we’ll find it soon.

Scoble was getting closer but still missed the key point here that we need to work *away* from the elitist “my speech is more valuable than your speech” nonsense that somewhat ironically now drives many of the Web 2.0 debates:

Robert I appreciate the fact you are arguing against something that would benefit you far more than others. However my beef with Loic is the idea that popularity or even authority *in any form* is something we should work hard to protect and promote. Call me a digital anarchist, but I’m tired of TechCrunch’s often regurgitated news stream. I find that increasingly I want to know what Peoria is thinking as much as what Mountain View thinks. Even though Peoria is rarely as interesting or well articulated or technologically sophisticated, it’s far more *representative* and if I’m looking for business ideas or social trends…I’d like to know that.

Scoblegate? No – Scobleizer ads are NOT a sellout.

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Mike Arrington, hanging in Davos with the global power elite, has a great title today with “Scoble Sells Out“, a fake jab at his pal Robert Scoble who is finally putting ads on his hugely popular blog (and is also lounging in Davos with the power elite!).

No big deal in my view – Scoble has been good about disclosure and perhaps even more importantly is a basically stand up guy, so I hardly worry that he’s going to start misleading readers in favor of sponsor B.S. 

That said, the blogging community would be well advised to develop disclosure standards if people want to maintain credibility and avoid the huge ethical gray areas that come about when socializing, economics, and blogging come together as they have over the past few years.

My view on corruption in politics (and blogging is similar) is that the challenges don’t come from basic dishonesty or payola – there is some of that, but the key problem is  more subtle.     In systems where economic support flows to those who *already* share the set of opinions with the money folks you don’t need any dishonesty to have a major distortion of the process in favor of those groups that can fund the people who share their ideas.    Often people wrongly suggest that votes are “bought”, when this is rare.  Rather support flows to the candidates who share the views of the supporters.     This system would actually work OK if the contributions were small, but loopholes have allowed certain groups to have hugely disproportionate impact on our system.    

This is why the conversational marketing model is bogus.  Bringing businesses into the conversation is a good general idea.  But if it only involves those businesses who can afford to buy a conversation  it’s just a step away from basic advertising, yet disguised as real dialog.   That isn’t corruption, but it is distortion. 

CES Coverage – Scoble Rules!

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I was wondering how the amazing Scoble was going to cover the CES hurricane of news and products and should have known it would be with a hurricane of Scoble video podcasts.    I wish I had more time to hang at the Bloghaus but there is more going on here than you can possibly even figure out.

Here’s Robert’s CNBC coverage.   

I give Scoble huge credit for having “walked the walk” about blogging for many years and helping others get involved and understand the power of the medium.    He’s also been showing companies how powerful corporate style blogging can be and it’s nice to finally see (some) of them “get it” and use blogging to elevate the quality interaction and the amount of connection to their customers and potential customers.

Here’s more from the MSNBC folks on the CES Floor

Hey!   I’m still looking for Donny Deutsch  Donny where are you?  Wait – he’s NOT on the road to CES after all.  He’s in New York! talking about CES.   Tech from New York?   Where is that exactly – isn’t that where they make Saturday Night lives and Rudy Giulianis?

Scoble : More friends than he can click a mouse at

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Robert’s got neat ideas about online “friends”, pointing out that the best definition for online friend is NOT the same as for offline “let’s have dinner” friends in real life.   But he’s complaining that Facebook is poorly engineered because it limits people to 5000 friends.   Over at Scoble’s blog several are correctly pointing out that he’s such an exception to normal use it’s not fair to expect Facebook to change for the few huge social networkers like Robert.

Uh-oh….I hope he doesn’t bump ME off his friends list now…

Dave Winer, meanwhile, is proclaiming that “Facebook Sucks”, noting that their image, video sharing, and some other features are inferior to the alternatives.   It’s an excellent point though Facebook may be opening up enough to allow integration with pretty much *all* other stuff, and if they do they deserve the praise now heaped upon them in almost nauseating fashion.   Thanks Dave for the reality check.    I wonder if anybody will heed it.

The rumors of PodTech’s death may not be greatly exaggerated?

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Update:   As far as I know PodTech is doing fine as of December 2007, and the rumors back in July were bogus or exaggerated.   Just heard from John Furrier that PodTech will again host a “bloghaus” at CES, one of the neatest “social tech” ideas last year in my opinion.    I’m a big fan of all that Robert Scoble has done to evangelize quality corporate blogging and really wish PodTech the best.

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Mike Arrington is reporting that PodTech is in trouble. I think this is consistent with the idea that content is no longer king – it’s a pawn in the big game to leverage the flood of free content and social networking activity, a game where the winners will NOT be the product of doing the “right thing”, rather winners will be the survivors of the evolutionary process that drives our rapidly changing digital ecosystem. Biological evolution works *away from failure* rather than towards success, and it seems clear to me this is also how internet company evolution works.

Mike suggests that PodTech might survive in modified form by scaling back and lowering their “burn rate” and focusing almost exclusively as a production and advertising house focusing on their own clients. I wrote over there:

Good insight as usual Dr. Mike.

“… get their burn rate very low” ummmm – can you cite any examples of a companies that did this in time to survive?

I enjoy Robert’s perspectives and consider him a real blogging leader and a digital inspiratation to the rest of us, but I don’t have the time to invest in his videos or PodTech’s other rich content. (just the facts please!)

Producing quality content is now playing with pawns rather than kings, and for some time it will be the companies that leverage the flood of free content or help people process the maelstrom of content that will win. e.g Facebook, Google, and your personal favorite winner, TechCrunch!

The painful thing if PodTech dies is that they did so many thing exactly “right”. They saw video and blogging as sweeping new online paradigms, they hired Robert Scoble who is nothing short of a digital inspiration to bloggers and video folks – he’s one of the elite onliners who puts his blog, money, reputation where his mouth is and actually engages non-elites regularly and with gusto and stays about as Web 2.0 connected as you can without exploding. Also, PodTech sponsored what looked to me like CES’s best new idea – the Bloghaus.

But planning and quality don’t necessarily breed success in biology or business, and PodTech may be just one more example of the harsh new evolutionary realities facing any digital animal.

As Paul K infectiously notes business plans are overrated. Twitter’s lack of a business plan may be the flip side of the evolutionary challenges – disorganization won’t hurt them and might even be part of the reasons it’s looking like Twitter will be …. hugely successful.