“About” Robert Scoble

Who am I? Everytime I forget I just go to Wikipedia and it reminds me.

Seriously, I’m suprised at the amount of data in Wikipedia about me. I haven’t looked for a while and it’s all up to date. Disclaimer: not a single word here has been written by, or edited by, me. Thanks to everyone who has put something on this page about me!

IE 7 says Scobleizer “not secure”

Juha Saarinen notices that IE 7 says that my blog is not secure. Is it my bad breath? My egotistical rantings? My attempt at defining the undefinable. Speaking of which a bird has been leaving a blog on my windshield lately. How do I know it’s a blog? It’s in reverse-chronilogical order (newest “post” is on top of the older “post”). Oh, and it is even publicly-discoverable. I can even permalink to it, if I had a Flickr photo of it. It must be a blog, right?

But, back to IE 7, not sure why I’m not secure. I’ll try to fix something on my side, if there’s something I’m doing wrong.

Interesting comparison of video game sales

Todd Bishop, in the Seattle PI, compares sales of Xbox 360, PS2, and GameCube sales, both before Xbox 360 came out and after. That reminds me, I gotta get our Xbox back from Patrick so Maryam can play Pacman this weekend. Heheh.

Update: TDavid talks about wading through Seattle’s “Maddeniacs” last night. I love the smile on his son’s face too! Can’t wait to hear the review.

Moving into the Zillow API

Lots of movement on the new Zillow API (130 new sites). The Zillowblog has the details and a list of cool mashups.

Tech Podcasting from Ireland

I love listening to Tom Raftery speak about podcasting and tech. Makes me pine for a pint of Murphy’s stout (local drink in Cork, Ireland). Tom runs the IT@Cork conference and talks about what’s happening in the tech industry in Ireland. Oh, and one of Automattic’s developers, Donncha O Caoimh, lives in Ireland (Automattic makes WordPress, which is how I publish my blog). I like their “about page.” This interview was done by John Furrier, who gets interviewed by Tom halfway through the interview too and shares a bit about what he’s thinking about for PodTech.

Investing in blogging, part II

Don Dodge answered back my earlier post with another post. Who said blogs aren’t conversational?

He said something interesting: “Advertising is the game, and you need HUGE numbers to make that work.”

Wrong!

I know of a conference that charges $10,000 (or more) to get on stage to talk to about 700 people. Not a huge audience. But they always seem to have a full deck of sessions. That’s an advertising model.

In fact, didn’t the Search Engine Strategies conference sell for tens of millions of dollars? For a tiny audience! And some conferences, like the defunct Comdex (which had an audience smaller than we had at Channel 9) sold for hundreds of millions. Right?

In fact, didn’t 7,000 people come to Microsoft’s conference and they paid more than a grand a piece to be there? Not a huge audience and advertisers paid big bucks to get in front of that audience.

Some blogs (not me, yesterday I had 17,818 HTML views and 30,575 RSS subscribers) already are seeing millions of visitors per day (hello Boing Boing!)

Not to mention that Huffington Post, which is what got the $5 million in funding, is obviously not a single-person blog.

I remember working for a company with a magazine that had tens of millions in revenues and only around 100,000 subscribers.

Translation: get the right audience and you can make things happen.

But, political sites are seeing nice trend lines up and wait until the next Presidential Election!

Speaking of which, most plays of any kind are not bankable. Just ask Bill Gates to take you out to the product graveyard out by building 16 up in Redmond. There are hundreds of products listed there and I can only remember a handful making money. Most aren’t even around anymore.

Something is happening in media and the VCs just want to be involved.

Or, did you miss that Digg has built an audience somewhere around a million per day and it’s not even two years old? Kevin Rose, last week at the TechCrunch party, told me that just their podcast, Diggnation, gets 250,000 downloads per show.

Would you invest in Kevin Rose? I sure would.

There will be more Kevin’s. And Om’s. And Michaels.

Who’s next?