Thanks Mary Jo!

I've been reading your blog for about 2 years now, you have alsways been Scoble to me (one O), but Mary Jo calls you Scoooooooble. Is that how you pronounce your name? It's like a cartoon character: Scoooby Dooo ... yech

But it IS huge Robert!

A man who had, to all intents and purposes, the best tech job in the world to leave to go to a podcasting and vlogging start-up is incedibly symbolic.

You've seen the future, the future is er...Orange...no, podcasts and vlogs...!

Well, I won't ever say anything bad about Mary Jo, she's a gem, and won't start now. So I will agree with huge, just I will add "bubble" at the end of it. As Channel 9'isms only works for certain very limited niche's. That's assuming it even does, as the metrics are not yet even proven, and don't flop up 1999 dot.com eyeball hits at me. Whole set of complex factors that go into measuring real metrics -- if you are getting unique's, or just raiding and duplicating other existing communities, if the gerbil activity is taking away from face to face meetings, if the developers and marketers are listening to the Early Adopter set and ruining the product for the masses. If all noise, and no music. All sorts of long term impacts and varied scenario's, answered all away with "eyeballs". Hasn't anyone learnt any lessons from the crash?

If Microsoft wasn't so MSDN chaotic and had more of a clear communication line, with REAL road maps, you wouldn't need to filter thru zillions of unofficial blogs and waste time listening to developers waffle on poor audio, shaky-cam videos, nor consult armies of analysts to try and make sense of all the moves from the scrambled-egg Redmondites. Channel 9 is really just a feel good emotional band-aid for overall corporate incompetence.

Customers want official information (hand delivered at that) with results, like yesterday. Wasting time with hour long random videos and 500 RSS feeds is just not good ROI.

"will SOMEONE please turn off the hype knob? "

That would be you, Roberto.

Chimpy W. Bushitler does it again - refuses to stop his slick oil buddies from getting illegal prostitutes.
Cyber-protests grow over soccer sex slaves
The international campaign against sex-slave trafficking in Germany at the World Cup is gaining momentum online, where one group has generated a petition with 20,000 signatures of protesters outraged at the practice, and other non-governmental organizations are offering aid for the exploited young women.
Last week U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the fight against the forced sex trade the "great moral calling of our time," as young women, kidnapped or lured with false job offers from Ukraine, Hungary and Poland are forced to perform sex acts for pay against their will.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., long known for his pro-life stance, held a hearing last week in which he noted that the German government facilitated the prostitution rings, run by the criminal underworld, when it legalized the sex trade in 2002. Smith noted that at the World Cup, sex entrepreneurs have set up temporary wooden cabins on the streets of Berlin, called "performance boxes," where the soccer fans are cavorting with prostitutes, some as young as 14.
Sites on the Internet advertise even more elaborate brothels, including the storied four-story "Artemis," located near the Olympic Stadium, which Worldcupweb.com describes as "ready for the hordes of mostly male soccer fans from around the world who are flooding the city."
Fans reportedly pay $90 for access to an array of 50 prostitutes, who are "outfitted with thong bikinis with a soccer ball motif," the Web site said. Rather than show porn videos to stimulate the men, however, the movie screens in the bordello are displaying the latest soccer matches.
"If you Google the term 'World Cup prostitution,' you will return hundreds of hits," said Austen Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a non-governmental organization with offices in Washington and New York. "There is a lot of outrage over this. The U.S. has complained to Germany. There was a hearing in the U.S. House last week."
Ruse's organization, founded in 1997, is also fueling the fury against the exploitative practices allowed by the German government. At www.c-fam.org, the NGO has posted a petition for concerned folks to add their names to in order to protest the German policy. By Gene Koprowski

Don't worry, dude. Most people don't think that. Most people in the world don't know or care who you are and are really really not expecting anything meaningful from you. It should be embarassing (but we know better from MS) that you're trying to pull the modesty routine to promote yourself, but you're as transparent as grandma's undies. The real world won't (doesn't) even know you exist. Consider the hype turned down.