Alan Wolk made an important point for marketers: do not get blinded by “Scoble blindness.”

What is “Scoble blindness?” Making products just for Scoble, or thinking that I, or my behaviors online, represent the mass market. Alan is right. They do not. But more on that later.

Here Seagate, our premier sponsor over on FastCompanyTV (they have sponsored my video shows for several years now, which lets me go around the world and meet the top tech entrepreneurs and innovators), shows they get this better than anyone with its introduction of Seagate’s FreeAgent|Theater HD media player (we have exclusive video to show you what the device does). The New York Times wrote up more on the device.

Did they make a geeky media center device that can do everything that geeks want? That will thrill me and my fellow geeks? No.

They saw that normal people (those people who don’t yet know what Twitter or friendfeed are) are having tons of troubles just getting the photos they shot on their new digital camera up on their big HDTV. Or, maybe they got a new FlipCam HD and they want to play their videos on their screen to show their neighbors.

They saw that normal people don’t yet care about playing YouTube videos or doing Internet stuff like I do on my MacMini (and you probably do too).

So, they designed a product for the rest of the people. Here’s why the geeks might care too. My dad, for instance, wants to see videos and photos I shot of our 16-month-old son, Milan. But he doesn’t want to go to the trouble of going to Flickr, looking through all the pictures I shot of tech execs and other things, just to find the photos I shot of Milan.

Using Seagate’s new FreeAgent|Theater I just bring a hard drive over with those videos and photos, plug it into the USB port on the new device, and they show up on his HDTV. It’s that simple. No setting up Internet accounts. No struggling with going through all my other stuff.

Will I have one attached to my TV? No, I already have a bunch of ways to view that content (and have had for years) but will I get my dad one? Absolutely! Now I can bring him new videos and photos just by bringing a hard drive over. Cost? $130 (plus the cost of the USB-hard drives). Comes out this spring.

That’s a good example of avoiding “Scoble blindness.”

Now, in regard to Alan’s post, I think he got a lot wrong about what I do. I travel the world and talk with tons of “normal people.” I understand them a lot better than you will ever get from my blog. But I am not passionate about having conversations with them about technology. They don’t read blogs, they don’t hang out on twitter, and they aren’t addicted to friendfeed yet. So, excuse me if I’ll stay focused on what I’m passionate about here and on Fast Company TV: bringing you the most interesting people and ideas in the tech industry.

You can’t serve everyone in a blog. If I started writing posts for “normal people” then the advanced people in the audience would get turned off. This morning I spoke to an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show that was very advanced. How do I know that? Most of the audience was using TweetDeck. If I started talking to them about basic stuff like “this is Google, here’s a blog, here’s a YouTube video” they would have laughed me off the stage.

So, I’ll take the “Scoble blindness” abuse in stride. That means that I’ve done a great job of serving the audience I want to serve: you!

UPDATE: Want to try one? We’re running a Twitter contest to get some into your hands. More details on that shortly.

I’m getting ready to go to CES right now. The big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. A group of eight of us are driving a small bus down there and we’ll be reporting along the way. But one thing I’m going to look for is useful small gadgets. See all the really cool gadgets will get lots of coverage. But what about the small weird gadgets off in the Sands Hall? Even Engadget or Gizmodo don’t get to all of them and, even if they did, you’ll forget them really quickly because during CES week they post six gajillion gadget posts.

What’s an example? Our Dymo DiscPainter. We store a lot of stuff on DVD because we shoot so much video and photo stuff. Making our DVDs look cool is mondo fun, but also makes us look professional if we ever need to send out video, etc.

Because it’s pretty pricey, $250, you probably won’t read about it too many places but it’s easy to use and prints right on the CD/DVDs. I just did one with photos of Milan. Seeing his smiling face on the disc looks a lot cooler than just writing on a label. The Dymo DiscPainter is a small footprint, single cartridge USB inkjet printer that does high quality printing directly onto the media. Goodbye stick-on labels! The printer comes with an ink cartridge, a few blank inkjet printable discs, USB cable and software that lets you add any photo and text you need. Just prepare your photo in your favorite editor, crop it to a 5.25″ circle, import and print. It’s that easy. High quality images/settings take only three minutes to print. Pluses: Small footprint, fast printing, great quality, easy to use. Minuses: A bit pricey. Printer is around $250.00. Ink is around $40.00.

Anyway, do you have any favorite gadgets like the DiscPainter? Ones that are a little more off the beaten path?

You will read TONS of stuff about Apple’s keynote. I’m watching it right now on several screens.

Why? Because in real time everyone is putting up slightly different stuff.

Venture Beat has a friendfeed room where you can watch in real time like a chat room, or you can view it standard threaded style.

That is very cool. Especially when compared to TechCrunch’s live coverage, which makes you refresh the page manually. So 1994. What, is Arrington trying to increase his page views artificially?

Compare that to Gdgt, which is where the two top guys from Engadget, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block are posting their coverage. They are posting pictures and flowing text in live. Really great stuff, especially when you put them in a window next to the VentureBeat live stream.

The standard place my son goes is MacRumorsLive. They are doing an excellent job too, but gdgt’s photos and VentureBeat’s interactivity are making them look old and tired.

ArsTechnica is posting photos and text live, but they make you refresh your page manually, just like TechCrunch does.

Finally, Engadget is doing their usual excellent job, but their page needs to be refreshed manually too.

What this does point out, though, is that there’s a real-time web, but that they aren’t integrated. Imagine if there was one place you could watch EVERYONE post in real time. Not possible yet, but I bet that by next year friendfeed will get everyone to build live rooms there. VentureBeat is winning this game by a HUGE margin!

Why is VentureBeat winning?

1. Their room refreshes live without having to refresh your browser page.
2. Their room has interactivity so people watching at home can ask questions.
3. Their room has text, photos, and potentially video from Qik cams and such.
4. Their room’s items and threads are all permalinkable. I could link you to something very specific there. For instance, here’s where they posted a photo of iPhoto Books. I can’t do that to the other live rooms.
5. Their feed can be reused and reshared in other places on friendfeed and on Twitter.
6. Ostensibly they could even mix in other feeds from their competitors through RSS searches. I have a CES room where I’m doing that, for instance.

This isn’t even a close race. If you want the best live experience there’s only one place to go right now. VentureBeat FTW!

Well, until I found Chris Pirillo’s Ustream where he’s posting the audio live. But I posted that to the VentureBeat room too. :-)

UPDATE: It got worse for gdgt.com and macrumors live. MacRumors’ site was hacked during the keynote and gdgt.com was unavailable during part of it.

UPDATE2: other people are using friendfeed to report from the keynote, but I can only pay attention to so much! I’ll put the best of those on my “liked” page. :-)

UPDATE3: I missed a few. Gizmodo has a nice live feed. AppleGazette is using CoveritLive. So is GeekBrief.tv.

Whew, that’s a lot of live feeds to watch! I think the smart ones are just going to wait to get the TechMeme
blog storm later. :-)

UPDATE4: Pirillo’s audio stream went down with about 20 minutes to go. Luckily MacTips Podcast had a live audio stream going too.

This week I’ve touched base with Panorama Software, socialtext, and now with Jive Software. Jive continued the trend I discussed a couple of days ago about enterprise disruption.

You are meeting quite a few of the companies that are disrupting the older players and trying to, as Jive’s CMO xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, said, open up a new social space inside companies. Hope you’re enjoying this look at the players. We’ll bring you others after CES.

Anyway, here’s Sam Lawrence of Jive Software, who talks with me about the economy, how they are competing with Sharepoint, and that they are working on a new version to be released in March.

Israel and Gaza are going at it on Twitter (and in real life, as reported over on news site Memeorandum). Shel Israel reports.