Scoble on SWiK

Why Blogs Need To Be Social

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:12:21 -0700

Earlier this week, San Francisco-based web publishing software company Six Apart released the newest version of its flagship product, Moveable Type, and pushed the blogging community into taking the first step toward a very social future.

It is not a new concept — since their early days blogs were all about sociability. Late last year, we backed Chris Messina’s wild idea that WordPress, the open-source blogging software that we use to power majority of our network blogs, could be become the underpinning for a social network. In January, Automattic, the company behind WordPress and the free hosted blogging service WordPress.com, bought BuddyPress to help bring sociability to blogs. (Disclosure: Automattic was started by Matt Mullenweg, a close friend of mine. We share True Ventures as an investor.)

Our friends at ReadWriteWeb theorize that in order for blogging to evolve, the blogging systems need to embrace the newly popular life-streaming services such as Twitter and FriendFeed, along with a growing panoply of personal web services (including the most fabulous, Dopplr). The team at Six Apart has combined the above-mentioned ideas to create Moveable Type Pro, a blog-publishing system with extremely social DNA. (Check out the Six Apart blog for details.)

Blogging Needs To Evolve

Six Apart is making the right move, for it is time for blogging to evolve. Many of us have forgotten that blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections. For instance, through comments I met folks like Robert Young, who in turn wrote for the blog, and then in the process became a friend. It is time to re-embrace and extend that philosophy.

Establishing those kinds of relationships becomes an even bigger challenge as newer tools emerge, enabling new kinds of sharing. Whether it is Friendfeed or Dopplr, videos or photos, we are constantly figuring out ways to share information about us on the web. In other words, our digital life is spreading out across the web.

Blog = Digital Life Aggregator

We have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services. Facebook, for instance allows you to share photos, aggregate your digital droppings, share comments with friends and exchange messages, but it doesn’t give you a unique identity on the web. In contrast, blogs with social features could allow you to do exactly that.

Marc Canter has been talking about this digital aggregator forever and has been ahead of the curve, though now pieces have started to fall in place. Robert Scoble is a good example of how and where things might be headed. He uses multiple services, and they are all easily consumable on his blog, where he writes longer, more engaging posts. His short conversational posts of yesteryear have migrated to FriendFeed, his video has bifurcated into long-form or live, short-form videos. I know Scoble is an outlier of this trend, but he was also ahead of the curve six years ago as far as blogging is concerned.

The Demographic Shift

As a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies — a theory that is articulated in Wired’s recent cover story. As the Wired writer quips, “Like it or not, we are all public figures now — famous, as the new cliché goes, for 15 people.”

The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes. I think folks who are blogging now (no, not just tech bloggers) are different from some of us early bloggers — they use different tools and services and have different views of sharing. In many ways MySpace and Facebook have changed what is OK, and what is not OK online.

With that as a sub-text, it is good to see the blogging systems start to evolve. Kudos to Six Apart for making the first major move. Suddenly, blogging tools are more fun — and social.

Open Question: How will you build the next-generation blogging system? I am going to be discussing this question with various attendees of WordCamp 2008 that is being held in San Francisco this weekend. I am speaking at the camp and have a exciting announcement as well.

PS: Get ready for BlogActionDay.org by registering your blogs, watch the new video, and become part of the movement that is about blogs making a change in our world.

PodTech purchased by ViewPartner for less than half a million, ending a bloody story " VentureBeat

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:50:12 -0700

Video: Scoble Tells the Comment Trolls To Go Back to Digg

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:47:28 -0700

Robert Scoble caused a stir yesterday with a post on how tech bloggers are failing our readers. We all chase the same stories, get spun like a top by the PR machine, and can’t sustain a conversation about a single topic for more than a few days before we all rush to the next shiny object.

I caught him on video at the (surprisingly snoozy) Fortune Brainstorm conference. He pines for the old days of blogging, before comments were taken over by trolls. He seems to think the trolls all came from Digg and should go back there. More likely, it is just a sign that blogging is attracting a bigger audience

The problem is, as he put it in his post:

Our commenting systems really suck. . . . Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.

It’s not only that. There was a time when a good idea (like a cheap Web tablet) would be chewed on for a month by the blogosphere, going back and forth between different bloggers, and getting refined along the way. We’re all slaves to the news cycle now, talking about the same thing for a day or two, and then moving on. But does it have to be this way?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

PodTech Sells For Less Than $500k - FriendFeed

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:46:26 -0700

friendfeed thread on demise of a Web 2.0 darling

PodTech Sells For Less Than $500k - FriendFeed

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:51:57 -0700

Scoble dishes in a some of his comments. Interesting.

PodTech Sells For Less Than $500k - FriendFeed

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:52:05 -0700

Long discussion on FriendFeed with Scoble and others on the PodTech failire

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger " Blog Archive Mike Arrington and Steve Gillmor don't use Firefox 3.0 "

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:55:00 -0700

Yet Another Drama About Twitter

Fri, 30 May 2008 10:49:27 -0700

Twitter, in a post on its blog, has acknowledged that it’s been having problems. It attributes some (not all) of them to so-called “popular” users that it says overloaded the system when they sent updates in too quick a succession. In other words, it was a tactical acknowledgment by the company of problems that have already been widely reported.

Of course Twitter’s most popular user is Robert Scoble, and as far as numerous successive posts have argued, he is the real source of the problem (prompting some not-unexpected foot-stomping on Scoble’s part).

I wrote about Twitter’s problem in a post last weekend and how they should charge for people like Scoble, Michael Arrington and myself for using their system so aggressively. Our use of Twitter benefits our businesses. Links to Scoble’s posts can drive traffic to his site or his videos, which in turn drives attention to his work and his employer. Same holds true for Michael and for me. On a more philosophical basis, it allows us to stay in touch with our readers, who in turn keep us in business.

Nevertheless, since common sense and paid services are apparently not part of this brave new Web 2.0 world, my idea didn’t play well. What was I thinking? Instead there’s this belief that Twitter, the ultimate tool of our collective narcissism, should be so lucky to have super users, that they are what make it popular with everybody else. I don’t subscribe to that point of view, but hey that’s just me.

For Twitter, the challenge of keeping the service going while at the same time fixing it to scale up is immense. Thankfully they have the money and what looks like the will to fix the problems. Will they? We shall see!

Update: The debate about Twitter rages on. Scoble met with Twitter team and talked about the various issues in a video interview. I got an email from Even Williams who is one of the founders of Twitter and this is what he had to stay:

We like the idea of charging for commercial use. That’s something we’ve been talking about for a long time (you can probably find my quoted saying that from a year ago). We’re just not there yet.

Given all different opinions, and other issues that have emerged, I have to reiterate that by charging the super users, I am suggesting that costs will bring in a sense of responsibility to the entire ecosystem. When there is no tax involved, there is no cost to having thousands of followers, or sending hundreds of messages. When asked to pay, heavier users will use the system responsibly.

FastCompany.TV Launches: More Scoble, Now On A Beach

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:42:10 -0800

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Nearly missed this one. The Robert Scoble run FastCompany.TV has launched with more Scoble, more often. In the intro video above Scoble explains what he has planned for the site, complete with a beach scene that is straight out of a daytime soap opera.

The site has launched with two shows, Scobleizer TV, Scoble’s own show that was previously with Podtech, and “FastCompany Live,” live video shot from cell phones Qik style.

So far Scoble hasn’t cried in any of the videos I’ve watched; perhaps in future episodes they’ll place puppies and kittens on the beach to get the tears happening, or maybe baby seals to keep with the nautical theme.

See our previous coverage of FastCompany.tv here and here.

Update: Here’s what made Scoble cry, his video of the WorldWide Telescope project. The light show starts about a quarter of the way in:

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

UI Designs : online media, etc.

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 02:46:25 -0800

Scoble doing an interview with some dude about RIAs. A nice RIA desktop app for ebay.

ZFS scoble show

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:31:58 -0700

A conversation with the inventors of Sun's ZFS

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:33:36 -0700

ZFS on Scoble.

The New Web War - Apollo - Silverlight - Robert Scoble

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:28:32 -0700

Visit Google's Finance site or Yahoo Maps and you'll see it. Check out any number of startups--such as Kyte.tv or multimedia scrapbook app Scrapblog--and it's right there. A new, more interactive, graphical, and visceral Web is bubbling up all over.

New Firefox update ain’t working here « Scobleizer

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:35:01 -0700

Brian Jones - New Office file formats announced

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:40:55 -0700

This is a pretty old video but it is an interesting insight into the thinking behind Office Open XML

Firefox on Macs giving people fits « Scobleizer

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:25:14 -0700

[from bushwald] IPhone: Scoble gets in lin

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:56:23 -0700

Best juxtaposition of the week.

Time for blogosphere to get real about church and state | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:09:31 -0700

Adobe opensources Flex (Exclusive Videos with Adobe) « Scobleizer

Sun, 06 May 2007 02:36:14 -0700

New Communications Review » Blog Archive » Doc Searls and Robert Scoble on What’s Wrong With Social Media

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:03:47 -0700

Two thought leaders, Robert Scoble and Doc Searls, weigh in on the term "social media"

Roundup#4: Running the Vatican site, Best Podcast Shows | ClappingTrees

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:26:01 -0700

ROBERT SCOBLE: The stress of podcasting - Valleywag

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:30:47 -0800

New Orleans

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 08:40:39 -0800

Scoble, following Edwards on the campaign trail: "Driving along I saw boarded up homes and buildings. Many of which still have spray-paint messages left by rescuers that say whether or not there were any bodies inside."

I couldn't pick a better launchpad. Go, Edwards (and Scoble).

PodTech.net: Technology, Business, Media, and News Podcasts

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 10:23:56 -0800

ScobleShow: Videoblog about geeks, technology, and developers

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 23:11:53 -0700

ScobleShow | Tachnovation

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 03:12:53 -0700

Ese será el nombre del vlog que lanzará Robert Scoble . Aún tendremos que esperar un poco, pero por ahora podemos ver un avance con el teaser vídeo que han preparado. Ciertamente hay ganas de verlo

MercuryNews.com | 08/06/2006 | Ex-Microsoft blogger starts on a new media adventure

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 11:00:43 -0700

MercuryNews.com | 08/06/2006 | Ex-Microsoft blogger starts on a new media adventure

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 05:00:13 -0700

Q&A with Podtech's Robert Scoble.

Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:23:52 -0700

Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger » Peter says podcasting is inefficient

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 04:23:40 -0700