New shiny things…
Dave Slusher says he unsubscribed from my blog and is getting off the hunt for new shiny things.
I guess he will definitely want to stay away from my link blog, then. I read hundreds of blogs looking for the best blog posts out there and put them on my link blog. Often those are posts about “new shiny things.”
Latest shiny thing post? Lifehacker has 10 cool things for Gmail.
Interesting to see the anti-shiny-thing backlash, though. Don’t know what I should do about it. Maybe I should write about printing presses. Antiques. Railroads. Or corded telephones. Or dead-tree media.
Nah…
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July 18th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I agree 10000% with Dave.
One a very rare occasion Scoble will post 1 thing that’s ok.
The rest of the time you’re better off with Digg or even Google news with the IT filter on.
Scoble is trapped in a macrocosm that spans about 50 miles and you can only take so much from his vantage point staring outside the bubble.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:48 am
“One” should be “on”, sorry.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Chris: you are so clueless you don’t even know how.
My Google Reader app in Facebook was built in Mexico.
My feeds come from all over the world, not just Silly Valley (you do notice that I subscribe to 4,000 Microsoft bloggers, most of whom are not in Silly Valley, right? Not to mention all the Amazon folks I read).
I don’t even know why you’re here if you don’t get some utility out of it. Oh, yeah, to spam us with your company info. Right. So my audience is interesting to you, but my content is not. Got it.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Or long-ass whitepapers with graphs (and monte carlo simulations!)
July 18th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Robert, don’t do anything different on my account. I’m sure the search for the zippiest and newest interests many many people. I’m just tired of it myself. I have ever shrinking amounts of free time to do anything, so I’m very sensitive to the feeling that I’m pissing it away on busy work that won’t ever repay the investments. If I ‘m going to be using that time on something, it needs to be at least as rewarding in either fun or results as recording another episode of my podcast or playing a Sit n’ Go at Full Tilt Poker. That’s my benchmark. Anything that wants my attention has to be more compelling than that.
PS - I unsubscribed from this blog, but I still have your videos subbed in Juice for the time being. Just because I unsubbed doesn’t mean I don’t like your work in general, I’m just trying to match my inputs to my priorities.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
“I don’t even know why you’re here if you don’t get some utility out of it. Oh, yeah, to spam us with your company info. Right. So my audience is interesting to you, but my content is not. Got it.”
Your audience rules. I love your audience. You make a good post once in a great while. You’re talking about something every day which came out 3+ years ago. Give people a break. Only VC and investors are really going to care about that.
Joshua Allen, here’s a little link MSFT.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=235
How can we trust whitepapers from you anymore?
July 18th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Dang Robert, calm down.
Just because you lost one subscriber doesn’t mean jack. All the pre-screening you do does have value to the rest of us.
But you can’t defend yourself by saying you subscribe to 4,000 Microsoft bloggers. We’ve had this discussion before - you don’t read, you filter.
But you do filter pretty damn well.
One problem I have with you since you left Microsoft is that your content is now so much more broader. You have all these video shows and to be honest with you I don’t have time to see them all. Even cutting them down to the “best of” isn’t enough summarizing for me and I’m sure for a lot of people.
You should get Rocky and do a weekly round-up show where you do something like a 20-30 minute summary show.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
“Interesting to see the anti-shiny-thing backlash, though. Don’t know what I should do about it”
Hey, it’s your blog. Do what you want. If you are in it to satisfy your narcissim, then continue to ignore your audience. If you are more interested in staying relevent to them, then listen to them.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
“anti-shiny-thing backlash” is just another name for information overload.
People only have room in their lives for so much stuff. It’s no surprise at all that some people are going to choose to limit their stuff levels if they’re feeling overloaded.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Why are you so cranky lately, Robert?
July 18th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Maybe not printing presses and railroads, but about beat reporters writing stories. The technological is fascinating, no doubt, but someone has to be producing content. A lot of this tech whizzbang glee often seems to assume that data will magically appear. I hope “new media” devotes the same amount of resources and manpower to traditional news gathering (walking into buildings, looking at files that aren’t available online, talking to people, cultivating sources beyond PR guys and spokespeople, patrolling a ‘beat’ like a police officer) as newspapers have over the last century.
If not, the we’ve built a great infrastructure with little depth to what it’s carrying.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Steampunk its the wave of the future past :-)
http://steampunkworkshop.com/
Though I suspect you have seen this one all ready.
Or Black is the new shiny
Persoanly I am looking at geting a custom IBM style Bucking spring keyboard for my new 680i based Pc which is using the antec 900 case :-)
July 18th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Scoble, I feel I owe you this. If you drop the VC nag stuff, and you work for IBM the same way you did for MS, but ask for a commission on new customers you would be a multi-multi millionaire. Period. Tell IBM that you get X high amount for every customer that comes through you. IBM won’t even open a folder with your company’s name on it for less than 500k.
When your contract with this startup runs out, do it. You’ll be uber rich. MS didn’t give you anything.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
LayZ: the thing is my audience has been writing me lots of notes and most people say they come here to hear about what the hot new thing in tech is and what my take on it is.
Matt: baby on the way. :-)
July 18th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Chris: if I cared about being uber rich I would have done a lot of things differently in my life. Heck, I probably wouldn’t be here talking with you now.
July 18th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
You talk about making a low $300 selling off ads on your facebook with applications. Your readers are largely business people and execs. You could easily turn that into big sales with IBM or another large contractor.
You have a very unique audience. Not the kind that I would try to turn over by selling $0.50 per click adwords campaigns to. You sold out much of your blog to Microsoft for a time, and your return was tiny compared to what it would have been.
I know you won’t do this, but if you tone down the valley talk, and do serious IT stuff, then sell contracts to your contacts, you could be uber rich now even though you didn’t otherwise set yourself up to be.
If you don’t care then more power to you.
You were correct though that your audience is worth more than your writing. A huge audience of tens or hundreds of thousands on most social networking sites is not worth yours.
July 18th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Robert -
I’m generally a big fan of the link blogging and the service you provide by staying in touch with the latest and greatest. Having said that….
The thing that grabbed me about Dave’s article is this:
Each time you pronounce a new site / tool / technology the new, official end-all-be-all uber tool of everyone who’s not living in a cave, you also declare that the last time you said that about a tool, it had a pretty limited shelf life.
After that happens a few times, your proclamations start to lose their value.
I’m not sure about you, but I find that new technologies far more often supplement older technologies than replace them. I don’t subscribe to email lists anymore because I use RSS, but that just reduces my email, not eliminate it.
I’m not disputing the value of new tools, I’m questioning how quickly the old tools really die.
July 18th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
@17 You mean like this, for example:
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/22/productivity-20-to-hit-hard-tomorrow/
Wherein Scoble says: “Today I saw something that will totally transform my work life. SmartSheet. Its Web site doesn’t do it justice. This isn’t about recruiting. I’m going to use it to totally change how I work with other people.”
How’s that working out for you, Scoble?
July 18th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
This blog has gotten pretty tired over the last few months. I’m no longer subscribed, but I still visit. But much less frequently than I have in the past.
July 18th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
D. Lambert: I still am using Twitter. Heck, I still am using MSN Messenger. You’re right, I shouldn’t say that the new things will kill the old things.
LayZ: SmartSheet is pretty good. The whole genre is very useful. Wait until you see this stuff showing up on my Facebook page (it already is, thanks to Zoho and 30 Boxes components in Facebook).
July 18th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
@20. That’s great,but that’s not the question. The question is: are you doing what you said you would do with SmartSheet. If not, why didn’t it meet your needs? Or was it just some random comment you made because you got a woody when you saw it?
July 18th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I’d heard about Scoble and how great his insight was; this is the first blog post I read and it sounds like a kid whining about someone taking home a ball that Scoble thought should be his. Sheesh!
July 18th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Robert,
I hope this comment reaches you. I know many end up in the spam compactor. I am about as tech-ignorant as one can be. Everything I know I learned from my WordPress blog, and in that I include everything I’ve learned from reading your blog.
None of your writing has anything to do with what generally interests me, but I appreciate it because your passion for your subject matter comes through. Your video work is what showed me you really know what you are on about. I have linked to your blog, and encourage everyone I meet to read what you have to say. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people like me who have never owned cell phones but who quite enjoy reading about what shiny new objects the geeks are rocking.
Your WordPress brother, Paul Rivas
July 18th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Scoble, lifes a lot more than getting to know all the CEOs in the world and reading all the blogs on the blogosphere. Honestly, get out of the complex of trying to proove to everyone in almost everypost how “cool” or “known” or “learned” you are. Please really dont care. Even if bill gates starts blogging on wordpress, people would not care. Get a life, do something, dont just sit there reading 9^9^9 blogs every single day. It’s a waste. What good is all this to the community. Any community. Really, last 100 posts of urs? 1000? Told us something we didnt know? (apart from how many people you know and how international ur facebook app is?)
July 18th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Wow this reminds me of when I was in high school. Eerr, elementary.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:09 am
http://www.osnews.com/staff/permalink.php/1569/how_to_blog_like_robert_scoble.html
July 19th, 2007 at 12:30 am
[...] take Robert Scoble and Shel Holtz as examples. The Social Media Index counts them as influential users of social media [...]
July 19th, 2007 at 11:07 am
“your company info. Right.”
You know Scoble, I had a good long night to think about this.
Today Mattieu Girard, our on call employee IM’d me and informed me that he left his long term position at Copernic Desktop search in Ste. Foy Quebec, and he is coming back to BeerCo for a 1 year contract, if we can get it fast enough for him.
I thought, hmmmm, this would be perfect for your audience. Copernic is the leading Desktop Search Engine ever made for Windows, and Mathieu worked there for a long time. He is a real pro. He had some differences with them and now one of the best web, desktop and embedded systems programmers is up for grabs for a 1 year value added contract.
Having him work on your project at our rates is like having a winning lotto ticket for business. More info at my “comment by Chris” link under this text in the news section. Act now or lose his service for an undefined period of time.
Thanks! Sincerely.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
[...] Scoble responds to me [...]
August 29th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
[...] of enough early adopters to establish your idea before they’ve moved on to the latest Shiny New Thing. Perhaps there are a few Luddites stuck on the far side who have enough pain that they’d [...]
December 19th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
But new shiny things are the reason the internet was created! I mean really, the internet is supposed to be a huge distraction that provides us with up-to-date cool stuff to keep our minds busy.
March 15th, 2008 at 6:30 am
I think that the real point is that there are constantly new shiny things coming out, but only like 1% of them really make a difference. Perhaps all you need to do is just mention them, but not rave about them unless you’re TRULY excited about them. And, even if you do, just be careful how your rave about them. That’ll probably keep your audience happy. Of course, you’ve got to decide who you’re blogging for – you? Or your audience? The answer should probably be both, but that’s a little bit of a cop-out. I think you should blog for you, otherwise you just become an old-media journalist in a new-media suit.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:18 am
It looks like you have lots of ‘shiny’ things but since they’re too many you can’t figure out which one to handle first. We’re all guilty of that. My advice: first things first.