Jack of all trades?

Steven Hodson, over at Winextra often makes thought provoking posts on his blog, which is why I am a regular reader of his. (Disclosure: Steven is a friend of mine, and I have enjoyed participating in the community forum he runs for many years)

Today was no exception.  Earlier in the day I had read the scobleizer entry on Robert Scoble’s experiment in travelling with a politician on the campaign trail. Something about Scoble’s post bugged me.  I wasn’t sure what it was – it seemed reasonable enough, explaining where he’d been, what he saw, and how he thought the experience would fit with his future endeavours.   There was little of the usual whining.

Then I read Steven’s post, posing the question Is there really any depth to blogging?  I realized what it was that had been bugging me.   So following Steven’s advice I thought about it for a while as I shopped with my wife for gardening supplies, and did some yard work. (Like she was just going to let me sit down and type this instead of shopping – yeah right…)  So eventually I got to sit down and write about my thoughts.

Firstly, there is a reason why Dan Balz and his colleagues were able to sit down and pump
out column inches immediately after seeing and hearing the things they did.   Dan and others are political correspondents. Dan has been involved in the paper’s political coverage as a reporter or editor for the past 27 years.   He knows exactly how the events unfolding before him, fit in with the way he has reported them in the past.   He knows exactly how he needs to report them to fulfill his objectives, and those of his employer.

Dan Balz is not a tech geek blogger, he does not write reviews for Vista loaded Acer Ferraris, he doesn’t write about football, crashing his car, losing his camera, or the political arguments he has with his family. He and others of his profession write about politics.   They live and breathe it.   Somehow Scoble thinks he should be able to keep up with professionals at the top of their game, during the build up to an event that occurs only once every four years.   Maybe Balz even “tries to read your blog, but can’t understand it.

Secondly, where is the stimulus for Scoble to publish?  He already has the scoop, the whole thing was done with the utmost secrecy.  How many other tech geek bloggers accompanied Edwards on his campaign as Scoble did? If Balz were to delay and think things over for any length of time, then he would be scooped by the NYT, WSJ or some other member of the press entourage.

The reason Scoble gives for his presence is that he was there to report on “the Tech side” of the campaign.   Meanwhile he drip feeds his readers tidbits such as “Edwards likes Diet Sunkist” – I’m sure that will get the political staffers knocking your door down to get you “that unique interview that is different from the ones CNN can get.” If there were 4
other A-list bloggers on that same trip, and ratings and ad revenue depended on it, would you take a week to “process the video and audio stuff” you got?

Readers might like to know whether Edwards check his Gmail account religiously every 15 min, or gets some flunky to do it once a day. How much time does the man himself get to spend on matters relating to his facebook or myspace pages? These pages appear to give some kind of blogger cred to Edwards in Scoble’s eyes. Safer to stick to the Sunkist eh?

Perhaps Mr Scoble should follow the advice of readers of his blog and stick to writing about tech matters, which funnily enough he can probably start typing about the minute he finishes his interview/test. Maybe for his next experiment he could run with a sniper or IED guy in a combat zone.   Tell us how cool under pressure those guys are, and how he’ll never be able to calmly sit down at a laptop in the middle of a war zone after a firefight and write a blog like a milblogger can.

Old School Vs Web 2.0

The outlandish comment storm surrounding Scoble’s Immigration post, reminds me of a feature that the old school “discussion boards” (how quaint does that sound to you sWANKy 2.0 hipsters?) or my fave NNTP protocol, had; which is the threaded discussion.

In a comment he posted to the Winextra blog, Scoble made the statement:

This medium is about conversations, not one-way messages.

Well, conversations tend to meander along at their own pace, and the attention span of the 2.0 generation is remarkably short, so it seems somewhat as a surprise that web fora (or is it forums- which seems far less pretentious, but somehow wrong…) and blogs/blog comments don’t have some way to thread their circuitous path, keeping point and counterpoint cleverly grouped.

Perhaps the light-speed attention span of the average 2.0er is beyond even composing a clever rebuttal to the OP (that’s original post for you non-nntp types).

Which all just goes to prove the wisdom behind this old school newsgroup saying in the picture.

5,000 people read my webpost and 4500 of them trackedback to them in rebuttal of what a complete nonsense it was.  This makes me an influencer…

Yeah right…

Do you know the handshake?

I was perusing my regular read of Winextra the other day, when I spied a comment by one of Steven’s visitors that suggested that once one becomes an A-list blogger then one must be hugely selective in to whom one links.

So I guess this just perpetuates the Tsar-like grip of the A-list and self-styled “influencers” then.

Only link to the ppl who can shell out 2k a pop for a conference, or that get to hold court with the real influencers.

At least these are all people that can be absolutely trusted. Not like some unknown Z-lister eh?

How many web pages are online right now? What is the average number of links per page? The top blog on technorati has less than 30K links to it.

Influencers.

Yeah right…

Wide awake in Dreamland

So Scoble thinks the USA is THE dominant force in tech, and its all due to the iranian immigrant slaving for minimum wage in some IT sweatshop somewhere.

So Robert, what is the difference between Iran censoring Blogs, and you “moderating” comments?

Any way you cut it, it amounts to an attempt at shutting down criticism.

Saying that the US dominates Tech just goes to show how deluded and separated from reality you have become.

Even if your hypothesis is correct then for as long as your borders remain open you will remain at the forefront.

That is a rock solid plan for driving innovation & leadership.

Yeah right….

Smart ppl don’t piss into the wind, Robert.

So Scoble wants to start another great OS debate. the three wise men (or women – or any combination thereof) to discuss the relative merits of Vista Vs OSX – sans zealots.

Their task will be:
Debate the strengths and weaknesses of each OS ,in order to give people a good mental model of what’s up on each. There is to be No “Digg commenter attitude.” Just the facts, back and forth.

This of course will add to the collective wisdom on the best/superior OS for any particular application/environment and will stir rigourous debate on the merits of each.

Yeah right….