Back to my passions

i’m really happy with our new site design on make http://www.makezine.com and http://www.makezine.com/blog we also rolled out an updated MAKEbot (add makebot on aim). he does “alerts/pings” and a lot more. lastly, our volume 05 is shipping and it really turned out great. sorry i missed you book party, i needed to go to dc for a quick trip.

I’m guilty of using email instead of commenting, I guess, but it seems odd to just comment on your blog unless it is relevant to your actual post.

You have stated in several posts that you prefer comments, but comments that just say “hey, look at me” are just comment-spam, right?

Robert: I don’t think so. And, anyway, I’d rather have an “hey, look at me” post than a “hey, look at me” email. Posts scale, email doesn’t.

you don’t belong in the same sentence with walt mossberg and steve levy.

Handy Blogger to English Dictionary Translation:
Passion = Irrational Exuberance

If not wetting your pants over something, thinking some social-software or browser plug-in will be world-changing, then you don’t rate. To talk to bloggers, drink 4 cans of Red Bull beforehand, then you will be electrical enough to satisfy. Avoid any mention of the killing words “business case” and never under any circumstances mention “niche markets”.

PS – Walt Mossberg and Steve Levy don’t belong ‘making sentences’ at all. Hired-hand Marketers posing as Tech Journalists, rewriting Press Releases and piffling out glowing feature-stories. Just like Wilcox and Gartenberg are Microsoft-rent-a-quote “analysts” so too are Mossberg and Levy “journalists”.

You have to know, thoroughly understand and be able to decipher the Scoble lexicon. It’s all clear after you run it through a few translations.

Christopher: what I saw today has a business case.

mujibur: if I don’t belong, you might want to read Mossberg. He wrote that I’m one of his favorite bloggers. Doesn’t that just chap your hide?

Handy Commenter to English Dictionary Translation: Whatever Christopher Coulter writes is gonna be negative, snarky, and will match his worldview. He never will put out an original idea of his own, just tears down other people’s ideas. In other words, he’d be a great blogger but refuses to give into the dark side.

Hey I’m hugely excited about a new site me and a friend have launched: http://www.surlygamers.com. Sounds silly, but we’ve been talking about doing it for ages and have finally got our stuff together, bought some hosting, and got it off the ground. It’s just two guys talking about gaming, but we talk so much about our love/hate relationships with computer games that we figured why not let the world know

It’s not a Digg or Technorati or Flickr, but hey, someones gotta ride the long tail

The danger then is that everyone will start plugging their sites in your comments which will lower the overall quality of the comments section plus there could be so many posted that you would only take notice of the first few anyway. Someone should start a hosted link plugging/management service for bloggers.. with ajax!

(Warning: shameless self-promotion follows, but you did say that anyone excited about their product should post!)

I’ve worked 7 years making a software product that has a tiny market, and Guy Kawasaki recently wrote that two of the top ten lies of entrepreneurs are “no one is doing what we’re doing” and “no one can do what we’re doing.” I posted a comment then that this is not always correct.
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_top_ten_lie_1.html

If you want to visualize a drug molecule approaching its binding site or watch the self-assembly and evolution of rationally-designed nanomaterials, there are very few choices of technique. I have one. You can see a glimpse here: http://www.complexfluidsimulations.com. (You can see I have not spent much of the last 7 years designing web sites. It sucks. But what it says is true.)

I have 2 competitors in the world. And a market of 1 trillion dollars in 2015. And, no, that estimate isn’t from Gartner, its from Science 311:622, 3 February 2006.

If you want to learn more, send me an email on the site.

Um…Robert, your JOB is to write about other people’s ideas and work, and promote them over any possible competitor’s. If you were feeling superior to Chris for some reason, you may want to dial that back, since you’re the other side of the same coin.

Feedlinx – http://www.feedlinx.com – Tracks “read” posts across email and feed readers on multiple machines. It also allows publishers to provide an easy email or feed subscription mechanism for readers.

I’ve become extremely passionate about RSS and its power to address information distribution issues. My passion has often bordered on obsession — and that’s why I’m writing this at three in the morning. This isn’t a bubble, it’s a spike, and the energy is palpable.

My latest project fixes an issue that I’ve had for some time. I like client-based feed readers. I use Thunderbird at home for email and feeds, and I use SharpReader in the office for feeds. Before Feedlinx, I would read my web feeds in the morning at home, and then the exact same posts would be downloaded to my feed reader at work. It took too long to figure out which posts I’d seen before. Feedlinx tracks the “read” status of my posts and keeps me in sync at home and at work. It can even email me my posts, and I actually like that method for the feeds that I monitor closely (like Rob’s).

I’m extremely excited about this service. Check out http://www.feedlinx.com right now!

I was just getting ready to send you an email but then read this post

I’m really excited about my new website http://www.ctxbay.com. It enables bloggers to monetize their blogs with contextual ads from eBay. Given the fact that eBay gives 40-70% of their cut to affiliates I believe you can earn more with ctxbay ads then with Google’s AdSense.
The site is in public beta. You can see example of ads on my blog http://www.ctxbay.net

Here is something that I’m excited about:

http://www.squeet.com

It’s simply the best way to get RSS feeds delivered to your InBox. No waste of bandwidth and the power and benefits of email. What could be better? In fact, you can subscribe to Scoble’s blog using this link:

http://www.squeet.com/?FeedUrl=http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/feed/

And it’s 100% free. Enjoy.

Christopher: what I saw today has a business case.

Wait let me guess, Ad Sponsored Ray Ozzia like moniterizations. I’d roll my eys, but that would be redundant.

And there are roughly 150+ Flickr copycats with just as much “passion” yet they languish, including Vizrea, which seems a Microsoft website non grata. You might recall the names, Mike Toutonghi, Brad Silverberg, Brad Chase, and Brad Schick. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Tag Silverberg on Channel 9.

As for returning Cingular aircard and buying a Verizon, your “passionate” friends where just competent. When you buy a junky Yugo and upgrade to a Oldsmobile, it’s not so much that people are “passionate” about Oldsmobile, it’s that you made a blunder of a choice and are the odd man out. If I buy a Palm III, and then decide to go Treo, should I say cause it’s on account of the “passion of the Treoites”? You could spin it that way, but it’s really just me being stupid and correcting my mistake.

Hey Scoble,

I know everyone is now asking for a plug, I just think it would be cool to talk to entrepreneurs. As a late stage VC, I think I may have something to offer that a few of the earlier stage guys don’t. I also respond to every email I receive, so that’s a bonus.

I’d love to hear from entrepreneurs who are looking for growth stage capital and even be a resource for you to refer people to.

Just because you’re one of Mossberg’s favorite blogger doesn’t mean you belong in the same sentence as him. His contributions to the world of technology far outweigh your own.

And I have to differ with Coulter on this — Mossberg is one of the few journalists who actually gets it and is critical of products, no matter who they come from. He has bashed Apple and Microsoft products alike.

Scoble is a paid schill no matter what he says.

i finally put a real url to my site that let’s you search all the three major (at least in my mind) search engines and vote on the one that returns the best results. it is a bit slow at times, but give it a try (i am interested in the results).
http://www.searchall3.com

Robert, you make a great case study for why the persuasion techniques outlined in Robert Cialdini’s Influence book really do work:-

> Here’s a little secret: want to get me passionate
> about something? Get every single person in my life
> passionate about it.

Social proof: we are more likely to be persuaded into doing something when we see a lot of other people doing it.

> Why did I return my Cingular aircard and buy a
> Verizon EVDO one? Cause my friends were passionate.

Liking: we are more likely to be persuaded into doing something when we see people we know and like doing it.

> Why did I try CoComment? It’s not cause Laurent
> took me skiing. Well, that helped.

Reciprocation: we are more likely to do something for somebody when they have already done something for us.

> I get bummed out when I hear people assume that
> getting me (or other A listers, or even someone who
> really has huge influence like Walt Mossberg or
> Steven Levy) to write about them will make their
> company.

Authority: we are more likely to do something when somebody who is authority in a particular field has told us it is a good thing. Whether you like it or not these people understand that you and Walt etc. are respected as authorities on new consumer gadgets and applications and they want you to write about their product.

If you want to learn more about these techniques and the two I didn’t mention (scarcity and commitment/consistency) go spend 10 bucks on his book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688128165/sr=8-1/qid=1140459823/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3296279-2186432?%5Fencoding=UTF8
It gets 4.5 stars from 161 reviews and, right now, has a sales rank on Amazon of #219, which is pretty good for a book published in 1998. It’s quite literally the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read (followed by David Allen’s Getting Things Done). I guarantee that you won’t regret buying it, in fact if you do I’ll buy it off you for $10.

Andrew.

exactly, success is directly related to the level of passion.

I’ve been blogging about Cialdini and NLP as a tool to become a successful musician. This pulls two of my biggest passions together, Music and Influence. I became an NLP Master Practitioner because of my passion for understanding influence and persuasion. And I’ve been playing music professionaly/passionately for 20 years. Put those together and you’ve got my blog, http://www.grahamenglish.net

And I’ve got you, Robert, to thank for much of my blogging passion. I’ve had your feed in my reader long before I ever started taking blogging seriously. And it was your book that clarified the need for a professionaly blog. So thanks

Oh yeah, and I got offered a job to blog about songwriting on http://www.bloggingmuses.com, based on the quality of my own blog.

Posting remarkable content beats sucking up to A-listers any day!

Scoble, this is really what you should be doing. Again, John C. Welsh is right. To continue to be valuable to your employer and add shareholder value, you need to get back to blogging about broader technology issues, trends and stuff that, as Chris says, has “business value”, read: can MAKE MONEY!. And then you need to tie all of that back to how Microsoft best maps to that stuff. Enough of the “look how important blogging is and how highly I rank”. I often wonder if you are as passionate about your employer’s goal to increase shareholder value as you are about your place in the blogging world. Do the former and the latter will come, with you even having to beg for it.

Dmad: it’s hard to do this job. Want it? It comes with 200 emails a day (actually 400, but that’s including all the ones you can ignore). It’s hard to keep it up every day and stay focused on the right things.

This is what I do, and what I am excited about:

from my blog, The Daily Technocrat
http://techandother.wordpress.com/
from the ‘what is a technocrat’ page:

“The goal of this blog is similar to the core goals of the Technocratic Movement of the 1920’s and 1930’s. At its core, the Technocratic Movement believed in…

‘…the optimization of the welfare of human beings by means of scientific analysis.‘ (Wikipedia)

[snip]

‘Ultimately, my goals for this blog are not for fame or compensation, but as they are in my real life, to contribute to the betterment of human beings by bringing about the technologies of tomorrow and by demonstrating efficient use of the technologies of today.’”

This is what blogging is all about to me. YMMV. Any support via encouragement is appreciated.

Dan

Robert:

>If you are good, people will notice.

This is where we fundamentally disagree. Our backgrounds, perhaps, explain this. I worked for Apple, we had a better mousetrap, we got our (marketshare) clocks cleaned. You work for Microsoft, it “was inspired by” a better mousetrap, it cleaned Apple’s clock.

If you take two companies with equally good products, and one knows how to suck up to bloggers and the other one doesn’t, I believe that the former will win. (One of the hardest lessons for me to learn has been that the best product doesn’t necessarily win.)

Be glad to take you to breakfast. I’ve been a long time admirer of your work. My RSS reader checks your blog every five minutes. In fact, I’ve made your blog my home page… Let me know when you’re in SV. I’ll be in Seattle in March if that’s more convenient. We’ll split the check so no one can accuse you of accepting a suck up.

Guy