Robert Scoble

I can tell you why Rackspace is so expensive: because they hired Robert Scoble! http://scobleizer.com/ A few years ago, I had a couple dozen servers when something major broke in the Texas facility. Every customer was effected and the estimate to fix was 4 days. I just called Scoble up ( he published his phone number on the web) and he got a Rackspace VP to get our application back up in a few hours. The customer support is well worth the extra money

He does excellent interviews with startup founders, which he posts on G+ and also on http://www.building43.com and http://scobleizer.com/.

Why are we writing to please Google? Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See: http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494 It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb. The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve. IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there. http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.

And just three years ago people wrote things like this: http://scobleizer.com/?p=7382 "It isn’t hard to see how they would become the coolest social network within a month or two. Even cooler than Quora. Heheh. After all, a lot more people identify with Angry Birds than identify with other services online (the same exec told me they can’t keep Angry Birds merchandise in stock). "

I thought this story was a repost, but it's just been covered many many times here and elsewhere. I dug up a few of the older stories to evaluate whether I was crazy, and decided to drop them here while I had them. http://technologizer.com/2011/11/19/inside-facebooks-amazing-oregon-da… http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebooks-new-datacente…

I believe this is called the "Robert Scoble"-effect. One could liken it to social media spam: I don't want to know Robert Scoble, don't find him notable, yet his name appears everywhere. Such people know how to insert themselves in the daily conversations and can count on the support of their followers to carry their views far and beyond. Most of the time those views are not much more than a catchy social hook. You Googling his name and reading this reply will likely cement Robert Scoble in your brain for a while longer. I find it an interesting, albeit at times annoying, phenomenon. Like the Quora drama (in which Scoble was able to permeate into a lot of topics): http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/30/why-i-was-wrong-about-quora-as-a-blog… http://www.quora.com/Dan-Kaplan/Sorry-Scoble-Quora-is-not-your-playgro…

Robert's article: http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/why-if-you-miss-siri-youll-miss-the-f… I guess most of us here in hacker news would have known Siri (from Sri) from its first public release. Many of us here also would have watched that Youtube video describing this amazing combination of technology. I guess I didn't feel any magic comes from the fact that I am not living in the US (so the app means nothing to me)

It's great to get such a glowing review from Andy on one of the TWiT Network's most popular shows. Longer term, I'd watch out for Tonara: they say their app can listen to what's actually being played and follow along, even if there are dozens of simultaneous notes. Scoble interviewed them recently: http://scobleizer.com/2011/09/15/tonara-an-ipad-app-for-musicians/

iOS had a pretty big headstart. Read Scoble's recent post on some hot Android apps [1]. They're just now beginning to do high quality apps first on Android. Momentum has started to shift. It won't happen instantly, but it does appear to be happening. [1]http://scobleizer.com/2011/05/09/what-i-learned-by-interviewing-23-sta… The money quote: "But the most interesting set of companies is being built around smartphones and here, for the first time, Apple’s iOS doesn’t have the coolest apps. For instance, Innobell lets you add social apps to a phone call. Only on Android today. TekTrak gives you really great security. But mostly on Android today. And WalkBase lets you track your phone’s movement through wifi and assisted GPS patterns in the room. Again, only on Android because Apple and Microsoft don’t let WalkBase talk to the radios the way Android does."

It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out. For some platforms, the best money can get you is still not good enough for an ambitious project spanning world, and having to undergo massive changes almost in realtime. Why? Because certain platforms don't attract top-notch developers. It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms. From linked article: > Silicon Valley has lots of talent like him. Think about the technology he knows. Hint, it isn’t Microsoft. http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-to-bets-on-…

Reminds me of a story about Larry Ellison: "He told me a story of how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say, let me help you out. What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings." I love that quote, via: http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/12/why-google-cant-build-instagram/

I did. It seemed to me he was trying to emulate Jon Skeet's Stack Overflow reputation (ref: http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-technical-recruiters-best-s… ) but looks like he misjudged his effort.

Education is as much about content as it is about the social experience. Putting videos of the lectures online is a great way of distributing content, but just like books, it is not enough. The experience of going to a class with other people and collaborate on projects together has not yet been fully replicated online. There are some nice initial attempts at doing that such as openstudy.com, curiousreef.com and to some extent scratch.mit.edu (disclaimer: I created that website). It might be that we will always feel the need of face-to-face interaction for our learning experiences, but you could imagine a nice combination of meetup.com + some online social space + content. As for reputation, I think things like this (http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-technical-recruiters-best-s… point out future directions.

I would highly recommend against using this tool, as it is against Facebook's Terms of Service. Robert Scoble was kicked off Facebook in January 2008 for pulling a stunt exactly like this (http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/). While his fame and contacts allowed him to get his account reinstated in short order, many of us might not be so fortunate.

You need to be able to convince your interviewees to participate. What's in it for them? See http://scobleizer.com/ for someone else who has solved that problem. One problem is timing. It's not sufficient to turn the interviews into enough money, you have to make that happen at the right time. I think that your budget is a bit low, but that doesn't mean that this will be more doable later or that it's not doable now.

Actual article here: http://scobleizer.com/2009/08/05/you-are-so-unfollowed/

"Oh, and I gotta admit that TechMeme is kicking my behind. I'm reading more than 900 feeds and TechMeme usually picks stuff I would have picked to put on my link blog and does it 24 hours a day and a lot faster than I can" Because "humans don't scale as well as software". The same applies to tech blogging. Is Scoble blogging for money or making money off blogging? ( the distinction is here ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70863 ) If you are a "Scoble type" who blogs for money and generates "meta-stuff" in the form of tech commentary that is time dependent, this is what happens. Software in the form of http://techmeme.com is displacing http://scobleizer.com. Now if Scoble could hack or was a bit more entrepreneurial he might have come up with Scoble platform/api to do this and licensed it.

MySpace isn't exactly a great example since many suggest its death spiral is due to their bet on Microsoft technology and .NET :) http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-to-bets-on-… I'm not sure Plenty of Fish is a great proof either (that .NET is good for a start-up) since it was built by just 1 man, who just uses Response.Write http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/: >> In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write... Even as a long time .NET developer, I don't believe .NET is optimal for Internet Start-Ups. Most of the pro-web talent are in Ruby/Python/node.js camps where they enjoy first class support of all the popular web DSL's (e.g. less, sass, jade, handlebars, etc). As well as all the bundling, optimization and minification tools which were available for years in other platforms and have only recently been a supported option in .NET with System.Web.Optimization. The pro-web (Single Page App) community is relatively non-existant in .NET. E.g. none of the showcase apps on http://backbonejs.org (the most popular SPA JS fx) are in .NET. The ASP.NET website packaging model doesn't scale (productivity-wise), since the larger the website becomes the slower build/iteration times get - which is especially important for start-ups. I do believe typed languages are better suited for typed back-end services - I just no longer believe in them for fuzzy…

I've been following his blog for 6 months or a year, but I'm finding myself skipping over more and more of his posts, and am considering taking it out of my reader. Your question spurred me to look at what made me subscribe in the first page and what's changed. I remember watching and really enjoying this interview with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson: http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/05/do-we-need-a-new-tech-literacy-behind… I found Olson to be smart and interesting, and Scoble asked good questions. I was excited to learn more about what people were doing with big data and industrial NoSQL, and that interview was a great primer. I also remember reading an essay of his on curation (http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators… that I thought was really insightful... after all, curation is something he's an expert on. That's around when I subscribed to him. If you go back to March/April/May of last year (http://scobleizer.com/404) he was writing lots of great, smart, important essays. Lately, I feel like it's more like startup diarrhea. A flood of interviews and links and startups and random crap that he's testing out. I guess that's what you have to do when you're focused on "breaking" news. But at some point I just don't have the patience to wade through all of it for the good stuff. Ironic reason for unfollowing an expert in curation!

Maybe Robert Scoble was prescient [2009]. "Here’s the phases of Facebook: Phase 1. Harvard only. Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only. Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only. Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph). Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph. Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph. Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph." http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-listened-and-w… > The takeaway from that is that the social features are really the killer part of this,” Zuckerberg told me. “Having good social integration is more important than high-res photos.” Look at the rapid rise of Instagram. If you make a product that makes you appear cooler to your friends and followers, you can attract a lot of users quickly. [1] "Previously, Instagram reported 100,000 users in its first week post launch. The startup is now said to be close to the 1 million mark" http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20101203/tc_mashable/instagram_now_se…

This isn't strictly a web application, but if you are a Java programmer then one project I'd recommend would be integrating the Twitter Search API with FreeMind for the purpose of facilitating real time curation of tweets. Real time curation is apparently the number one request for software that the twitter people get, and FreeMind is the ideal platform for curating tweets. All that's needed is a way to intelligently get tweets into FreeMind so that they can be quickly sorted appropriate buckets, and since FreeMind is written in Java it might be a good fit in terms of skill set and project size. To give an example of how this would be used, the project described above would reduce the time of making this from about seven hours to about an hour: http://www.squidoo.com/Hacking_Education Also, here are two relevant blog posts: http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators… http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/curate-for-me-an-idea-for…

Herein Scoble fulfills the "huge responsibility"[1] of getting a rare TED press pass by reminding us once again of how awesome it is to be Scoble. In a truly shocking turn of events, getting to attend has made him no longer jealous of people who get to attend. Sweet badges, networking with rich folk and stage decor that helps you "weave together a fabric that encourages your mind to explore new ideas" while staring off into space during a boring talk will do that to you, I suppose. If I didn't know that this is just how Scoble writes about everything, I would have come away with a worse opinion of TED than I had going into it. TED is supposedly about "ideas worth spreading", not how awesome it is to be rich and white (or fashionably ethnic). If I wanted to know about things rich people do that I will never do, I'd watch My Super Sweet 16. It's no wonder they don't hand out more press passes. I think the way to address complaints of elitism is to not. If being an exclusive event is how the sausage gets made, great. Reasonable people understand that the hype and pretense surrounding TED does not negate the value of the content that it produces. Reasonable people skip the unbearably pompous intro music and the punctuating two minutes of advertisement for things that rich people care about and simply enjoy the talks. Reasonable people don't care about how awesome it is to get into the exclusive club. [1]:http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/a-ted-responsibility/

Robert Scoble on G+ Noise controls, 2011: "Why yo daddy won't use Google+: no noise control" http://scobleizer.com/why-yo-daddy-wont-use-google-no-noise-control/ Blocking fuckwits helps, but you've got to be tremendously brutal about it. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq

I think it dates back to 2008-ish[0]. NYT's also been adding archives and features[1]. The latter gives an overview of their approach to the technical challenges of serving up MB's of data from scans. Tl;dr, NYT tiled the scans into "digital maps." [0] http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-machine/ [1] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-timesmachine/

Nice set of locations. I miss some of these http://scobleizer.com/2010/10/04/silicon-valley-places-that-paul-graha…

Here are 3 guides to things to see in the area http://paulgraham.com/seesv.html http://scobleizer.com/2010/10/04/silicon-valley-places-that-paul-graha… http://steveblank.com/2011/02/22/a-visitors-guide-to-silicon-valley/

Scoble did actually say that: http://scobleizer.com/2010/12/26/is-quora-the-biggest-blogging-innovat… But when people started to downvote his Quora answers he took it back: http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/30/why-i-was-wrong-about-quora-as-a-blog…

Ugly sites can convert better: http://scobleizer.com/2006/03/04/the-role-of-anti-marketing-design/ See also: Any direct marketing long form sales letter.

For some ideas, have a look at: http://www.paulgraham.com/seesv.html http://scobleizer.com/2010/10/04/silicon-valley-places-that-paul-graha… http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/things-to-do-and-eat-in-silicon-valley/

Critics have strange biases. See Scoble's review of the Palm Pre for an amusing historical example. http://scobleizer.com/2009/01/08/palm-did-what-nokia-rim-and-microsoft…