Scobleizer: Have I lost my “blog power”?
Chris Messina
· 3 years ago
I hear ya man. I'm so snowed under with email that I need a week of snow days just to catch up today. Heh.
And on your topic of fours, long ago I determined that I would only write for my proverbial four readers to get over my fear of unfamous (even though I was far from famous then and remain so today).
Anyway, small is the new big, as Godin likes to say. We're bankin' our business on it, so we'll see how far that gets us. ;)
Pat Phelan
· 3 years ago
I think Steve Gilmour is corect.This is not about links etc. I started about 6 weeks ago and chased my tail for a month becoming a total link junky. Now I write about subjects I like and one on which I have a little knowledge. Traffic builds slowly and I can sometimes go a week without a comment. But hey I got 445 hits yesterday and if I get 446 any day next week its progress. This isnt about who has the most toys its who gets to enjoy himself with the toys he has. Keep doing what you do.
radaronpaws
· 3 years ago
I sure as heck am not the right guy to tell someone how to blog. But I wouldn't revisit what you've done or worry about what you should do. Sometimes your blog is a little incestuous with regards to the "blogosphere" but aside from that I don't really see anything has changed except we don't get quite the same insights into microsoft that we used to. Only time will tell if that's all that really interested your readers or not. Somehow I doubt it, but I am wrong a lot of the time.
I could see how a dip in readership from time to time might be a bummer if you are used to tens of thousands of views per day. So maybe it's stupid for me to say, don't worry about it, but... don't worry about it. :)
met
· 3 years ago
I thought you said you had the best ranking ever last week.
Ivan Pope
· 3 years ago
Sure, there's a lot of stuff going on. But so what. Know it is, then ignore it. You're in a startup now. You can't know everything. It isn't your job. All that great stuff will affect you when it's ready. Your job is to know your neck of the woods. As for all that email - what is it? Who is sending it? I assume most of it is speculative. Put an autoresponder on your email - Scoble apologizes, but he is in a different neck of the woods for a while. Please use a different method of getting his attention - like starting a great podcasting company. Then enjoy.
Met: Wordpress.com's traffic log says one thing. But I trust guys like Anand who point out that people aren't visiting him as much as they once did.
It's very possible that there's reader fatigue. Or that I have different people reading me today than read me a year ago.
It demonstrates, though, that having a lot of traffic isn't what matters. What matters is getting the attention of people. My thesis? A post on an event in India talking about .NET isn't as interesting as it was a year ago.
It also points out that I don't have the power to get you traffic, even if I link to you.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Ivan: I like that!
Here's my email folders (I'm triaging my email into folders now):
Add to Calendar (2) BlogStuff (447) Events (52) Interview requests (59) Mom stuff (6) Stuff I haven't triaged yet (199) Stuff for PodTech (115) Business Stuff for PodTech I still need to answer (129) Requests (usually tech support for Microsoft) (65) Scoble Show (18) Vloggies (6)
Whew, a lot of stuff.
Hugh MacLeod
· 3 years ago
Some people think there's some imaginary sky fairy out there, who magically pays "A-List" bloggers big money to keep their stats high ;-)
I'm still very interested in hearing what you have to say... although recently you seem, like me, a bit overwhelmed by the pace of things.
Thanks for posting the cartoon =) Rock on.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
I don't think you have lost much blog cult power, per se. He hit it right in the 4th paragraph, people don't much care about .NET stuff from India, plus India still has the outsource bad taste ("they stole my job" and etc.), and .NET is losing ratings points minute by minute. And you overhyped it, causing people to just ignore, like Smartphone, Tablet, UMPC, Vista...
But the real bottom line: any events in India are serious buzzkills.
You still have your cult power. But that "power" is isolated to a select smuggy geeky group, half of which will be indicted by the SEC...so don't let it goto your head. I'd cut off and do a contentish Podtechy blog...and keep the insider-baseball and rants to this blog.
Farm out your email load, get trusted associates to comb thru and daily brief...be Corporate and Presidential about it...
Jonathan
· 3 years ago
How many bloggers are really little more than 'summarisers'?
A good blog should be interesting in the same way that any other media is interesting; i.e. original, quality content.
I rarely go to any geek events on weekends --gotta get away.
Jonathan Buckland
· 3 years ago
It's fantastic that you get to meet all these amazing tech people but why are you not publishing videos of these events.
The aspect I liked the most when you were at MS was all the interesting people I would meet through your videos.
Just plain text on the blog all the time gets a bit dull some times. I just don’t feel part of it any more.
Would be great to get your comments on this…
fauxpress
· 3 years ago
Your musings on the best conversations caused me to finally publish a meditation on my own theory of how to facilitate the best conversations. Have been working on it for years and have the methodology down to a science.
I haven't followed your blog long enough to really witness a trend in one direction or another, but I am not surprised that a single story on your blog doesn't generate as huge a number of referrals as some might expect.
You seem to take more of a shotgun approach to blogging. Somedays you post as many as ten (!) entries (August 28, in recent history). I personally find this a bit exhausting, so I pretty much just scan the subjects for interesting keywords (which is all anybody should be expected to do, I guess - but on other blogs the title may be gibberish and I'll still read because the signal to noise ratio is much higher).
Whereas some blogs seem like 99% editorial filters, yours is more of a reflector dish. Too blinding to click through, at times.
Brian
· 3 years ago
Please! I've been reading your stuff for over a year. I would rather see you publish fewer posts with more meaning in each one. Rather than link to some else's "named" blog; try linking to stories rather than glorified ad pages. Jonathan and Daniel J have got it right.
Philip Colmer
· 3 years ago
Robert
Is your email deluge the reason why I haven't heard back from you about my problem with Hi-MD audio encryption and a duff disc?
I hope that your interest in finding problems to solve might get you in touch with me :)
Philip
Frank Shaw
· 3 years ago
Robert, don't get lost in the bubble. I grew up in the Valley, it was great -- you could feel the energy. I went back in 1999 and it felt ill -- there was an arrogance, a bubble of ego, a disconnect from reality that felt just like the Beltway, where there was a reality distortion field so strong that people lost common sense.
It's happening again -- keep your eyes on the real -- you are so right to look to make the right people connections.
Greg Furry
· 3 years ago
Robert - I am sure you still have the power. Just to make sure I offer up my blog. http://dazilgroup.com/blog Go there find something to link to and I will give you the results. In the past I have been linked to by Digg, Netscape and Valleywag. And many others but those are the ones that really brought the traffic. My guess is you still have the power.
Al Pascual
· 3 years ago
Kind of agree, you have been too busy I'm guessing to comment in new tech as much as you did before. Also you have not link me yet :-( Should I post something bad about you? :-) Cheers Al
LayZ
· 3 years ago
Well, CTRL-Del on the BlogStuff folder can get rid of 447 messages right off the top. Like you said, leave a comment on your blog.
Someone needs GTD ;-)
Ajay
· 3 years ago
You defn haven't lost your blog power.
After you linked to my site about the scraper, my site visits soured, so did the comments on that post :)
Thanks!
Dan100
· 3 years ago
Best tip I ever heard about dealing with a flooded inbox: delete the lot.
If anything was important, they'll e-mail you again :-).
Larry
· 3 years ago
"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer."
One thing that has remained consistent about people with power: they all lose it eventually.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
Best tip I ever heard about dealing with a flooded inbox: delete the lot.
So if can't handle, burn down the place? And that's assuming the other "important people" aren't super busy themselves, deleting is not a solution. Proper management of is...
The answer to a busy schedule is time management not the elimination of all appointments.
Brian
· 3 years ago
You need to start ripping into your employer again. Those were entertaining days. I read anxiously each day to see if Scoble could get himself fired. :)
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
LayZ: I have GTD. But it doesn't work for someone with my flow level. At least not if I'm trying to do something else. What I probably need is to hire someone who'll do nothing but do my email and calendar.
booger
· 3 years ago
"What I probably need is to hire someone who’ll do nothing but do my email and calendar."
That's just what a startup needs.... :)
Booger
Marie Germain
· 3 years ago
Hi again Robert. It was helpful to hear your comments about your desires for a small campy get-together. Well.. you and I don't know each other well--except for the fact that both you and Tara (and other folks you know) are speaking/performing at PLEXUS 2007 this coming May. I HEREBY commit Plexus to hosting such an event for like-minded folk during the evening of May 1 (Tuesday evening, which means everyone has to go to bed at a reasonable hour and under 3 mai tais, to perform well the next day). I will make you the Guest of Honor, and in fact, I ask you to guide the look, sound and feel and I/we will deliver--let's call it Robert's Camp at Plexus 2007. You see I can't produce that during the day to a corporate audience--a scientific/geek audience yes, but not corporate. But I trust that our customers of the last 10 years CEOs, VPs, Directors of corporations including tech cos won't acclimate to camp at this point. Surely some are closet campers. With the ambitious scope of this event I don't feel like gambling with our day hours--although we aim to make it a different, sensory experience. Our site does not show what we are cooking yet (not frnaks and beans). But for the "wandering aimlessly", let's do it a la FooCamp, BarCamp--we can even pitch tents or lie around on the floor... Your call. I count myself among those lying around--will be somewhat liberating to shed a little social decorum for some authenticity, some truth or dare... So I await your comments back--I did not email you this since you are happy to share this way--true to blogging. Perhaps all campees could pitch in in creating this evening. I await you creative insights.
Rick
· 3 years ago
Call me crazy, but I don't think you need to blog as much as you do, particularly for someone so busy with work or who's off to another party (sometimes they seem to be one and the same).
Try adding up the number of words you've written in, say, the last two weeks. It's a lot. Possibly too much.
RB
· 3 years ago
Thanks for the link, dood. This means EGR will *definitely* get over 100 hits this month!
oh yeah, we're Keepin' it Real(tm) over here.
LayZ
· 3 years ago
@28, Dude, I'm not talking about the Outlook add in. Agree that thing sucks for high volume mail. I'm talking about the GTD practices.
Nicole Simon
· 3 years ago
It has to do a lot with the audience. And it depends on the topic.
Haven gotten some links of you they all resultet in different clickbehaviour - some strong, some not.
raincoaster
· 3 years ago
You've been very mobile recently, both geographically and topically, and I think that's definitely had an effect. When you were "off the grid" only the people who were interested in that experience were making you a must-see. And you can definitely own that space in time, but a week later you're doing something completely different, and blogging about that, so you'll lose those people. You've got to start over again from scratch building an audience.
I'm stating it extremely, but that's in effect what's happening. When you were at Microsoft you were blogging about Microsoft and things that affected it as well as about your life. That didn't change and so over time you came to own that blogspace. You were the default for that category. Now you're blogging about some main thing which switches every week or so at least, because what you're actually doing switches. That means you start to gain people in that field, but then you start to lose them when you switch to another field.
The only solution to this is to be Robert Scoble, not the brand, the blogger, the individual. It's the writing and the thinking that you do that will bring back the people you pick up in your bloggy travels. You've got it; have faith in it and use it.
Gawd knows I am the farthest thing from a techie. It took me THREE YEARS to learn how to paste a picture into a forum. But I read you because you think and discuss the larger issues of the blogosphere, like this one, and you do it with humility, openness, and intelligence. I don't always agree with you, but I always respect you.
What's juice, and does it matter? It's not heart, and heart is worth more in the long run. Remember "Love is the Killer App?" Well it is.
raincoaster
· 3 years ago
I should perhaps add that today, if you look over your shoulder in the English language Top Blogs, I'm right there at #2. And I won't be next week. I know this. I caught a meme as it was rising and got lucky. I am the biggest famewhore you'll ever meet, but even I don't take this seriously; it's a discontinuity in the blog-time continuum.
If my blog is good, I may retain a fraction of those new readers. A TINY fraction. The quality of any individual post is almost meaningless to a blog in terms of retaining readers. It's the topics explored over time and the quality of that exploration that will bring people back.
If I may overanalyze, I think there's been some unsteadiness in your tone recently; nothing I can put my finger on, but it seems like we never know what we're going to get recently, in terms of tone or subject matter. Once your life settles down a bit more, it seems natural that your self-expression in the blog will as well, and that will bring them back. I'm sure you'll see a spike soon enough.
Dimitar Vesselinov
· 3 years ago
Robert, I think you, John Furrier, Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Tom Foremski, Matt Marshall, Rafat Ali and Danny Sullivan should work together. Make an alliance. Coordinate your efforts. Build the next media empire.
How does one lose something they don't have? That's what I can't figure out.
LayZ
· 3 years ago
How does one lose something they don't have? That's what I can't figure out.
jsaltz
· 3 years ago
An abomination.
joeduck
· 3 years ago
You just need more Paris Hilton stories....
Rob La Gesse
· 3 years ago
Robert - I don't think so. Since you linked to my blog earlier this week I have had thousands of visitors I would not have had - from all corners of the earth. 1300 hits from Redmond alone :)
Rob
Cornelius
· 3 years ago
1. Write about stuff that's relevant to you. Don't blog about blogging, or bloggers or anything else terribly meta. Just pretend there's absolutely nothing new, exciting or unusual about the process of blogging. Instead, write like you're telling your friend about something cool you've found (50%), or like you're having a nice chat with yourself (50%). That includes not worrying about what you listeners think - they're your friends after all, right?
2. Figuring out what's relevant means getting rid of everything that isn't. This may well include 70-80% of your email, though I suspect you get more interesting stuff than me.
3. Focus. Talking about something coherently means not talking about a million other things. Tough luck. It's called the blogosphere for a reason, those other guys want to come up with something interesting too from time to time.
4. Don't burn out. Sit back and take a deep breath. If you went hiking in the Rockies now for a week, web 2.0, the blogosphere and the tech industry would still be there once you came back. Provided that you still felt like writing and talking about that stuff, nothing at all would have changed.
It's that simple.
gautamghosh
· 3 years ago
The long tail has hit the blogosphere itself I guess
And people are using more aggregators and keeping track of blogs that interest them
Now there are a lot more journalists, sales guys, PR folks apart from techies who are blogging. In fact in the list of most linked Indian bloggers the technoloogy bloggers are probably less than 10%.
kosso
· 3 years ago
step out of the echo chamber and back in to the fun park, Scoble! :)
Al
· 3 years ago
I think you need more focus, more filtering that gets you to the real dope.
But you have a few issues because of the shear quantity hitiing your listening channels.
Sounds like you have an itch to scratch, remember the open source adage scratch that itch for yourself.
I would move away from the old school email as it is highly inefficient for these sort of quantities.
I would also think about using your community to help create a social software that helps filter your (public) incoming information feeds. Create a companion site dedicated to this filtering have your community vote/rate on incoming streams based on categories, let the social effects move the interesting stuff to the top and then concetrate on those. A kind of social blog where the subject matter is decided by the adience/community.
'Use the force Robert'
good luck regards Al
John Evans (Syntagma)
· 3 years ago
Robert, you've just hit what Gurdjieff called a "half interval in the octave" ;-) However, here's proof of the pudding.
Michael Markman
· 3 years ago
1. I think you already know what's important for you to do right now. (Nike slogan goes here). Just in case you want more kibbitzing... 2. I think LayZ has it nailed: GTD 3. It's not you, it's the bubble. We're close to (beyond?) saturation point with incremental me-too variations aimed at solving the same small number of problems. The payoff for your readers in checking them all out is diminishing. Point only to things that deliver exceptional new value. 4. The audience for a "Tech Geek Blogger" might be a subset of the audience for a "Microsoft Geek Blogger."-- or it might be the same audience, but with diminished interest. 5. You have a finite amount of you to invest--you're going to need to allocate carefully between the thing you built (this blog) and the thing you're building (your show and PodTech). Granted, there are synergies and the two things can nourish each other, but that only makes it easier to avoid making the required choices. As you say video takes a lot more time than text. Therefore...
vanni
· 3 years ago
you have a cool "dingy-thingy" at this url: http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/have... that looks liek a happy face. i think this is interesting....cause it is so mysterious! look for it just under your header image just under the "Sc". cheers PS as someone famous once said... "if you are worried about being boring well then darling you are...."
Nick Douglas
· 3 years ago
As for the plethora of events, give it a few months and you'll get over it. I already am.
Kevin Heisler
· 3 years ago
Robert,
Don't be so hard on yourself. You're still as great a blogger as ever. It's not you.
It's the BRAND.
Before, you were the uncensored voice of Microsoft. You were more than the fly on the wall of MS. You were the guy who let the world know all the cool things MS was doing, and a lot of the stuff they weren't. Who else could ask for Flickr in Redmond or tell us the real deal on Origami?
The same thing would happen to Matt Cutts -- another fantastic blogger whose popularity correlates directly to his role at Google. Take Matt out of the plex and he would still write great stuff and do videos on SEO. A big part of his appeal, though, is his ability to provide the real scoop on Big Daddy and tap into the massive Google Brain Trust. You've got a tougher road than, say, journalists who leave a major daily because their sources don't dry up.
It's really tough to scoop someone who's 100% dedicated to getting a story in the mass media -- or a Drudge-like "blog-as-business." Plus, they can guarantee their sources wide distribution and in most cases syndication. You've got a business to run now and I'm sure revenue targets to meet as a direct result of your daily efforts.
You and Matt have created your own brands and have a group of readers who will continue to follow you no matter where you go or what you do.
You're like any player who gets traded by the Yankees. In pinstripes, they're the guys everybody loves to hate. Once out of the hated Yankees uniform, they can still be great players but they're not going to generate the same buzz in the media.
I may be wrong, but to find out, let's check in with Alex Rodriguez in a few years. In pinstripes, he's the most hated player in baseball even by his own fans. A day doesn't go by when he's not under the microscope in a way he never was as a lone Ranger.
Scott Royall
· 3 years ago
Robert,
I'm sorry but our influence largely comes from the people we keep company with. When you were with Microsoft, you were a window (pun intended) into the inside of Microsoft. Now? Microsoft does have many other blogs, but they have a very "corporate" feel. Yours did not. Now you represent a very small company that may or may not have an impact in the near future.
I am sad to say that I don't much care about what your new employer is doing. Video is video. It's the content that matters of course. Podcasting isn't yet doing things I care about, and that does make you somewhat less interesting to me. That's a PITY.
All Comments
And on your topic of fours, long ago I determined that I would only write for my proverbial four readers to get over my fear of unfamous (even though I was far from famous then and remain so today).
Anyway, small is the new big, as Godin likes to say. We're bankin' our business on it, so we'll see how far that gets us. ;)
I started about 6 weeks ago and chased my tail for a month becoming a total link junky.
Now I write about subjects I like and one on which I have a little knowledge.
Traffic builds slowly and I can sometimes go a week without a comment.
But hey I got 445 hits yesterday and if I get 446 any day next week its progress.
This isnt about who has the most toys its who gets to enjoy himself with the toys he has.
Keep doing what you do.
I could see how a dip in readership from time to time might be a bummer if you are used to tens of thousands of views per day. So maybe it's stupid for me to say, don't worry about it, but... don't worry about it. :)
As for all that email - what is it? Who is sending it? I assume most of it is speculative. Put an autoresponder on your email - Scoble apologizes, but he is in a different neck of the woods for a while. Please use a different method of getting his attention - like starting a great podcasting company.
Then enjoy.
Seth Godin
"Let's get small"
Steve Martin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Get_Small
Pass me those Garlic Fries!
Anonymous
It's very possible that there's reader fatigue. Or that I have different people reading me today than read me a year ago.
It demonstrates, though, that having a lot of traffic isn't what matters. What matters is getting the attention of people. My thesis? A post on an event in India talking about .NET isn't as interesting as it was a year ago.
It also points out that I don't have the power to get you traffic, even if I link to you.
Here's my email folders (I'm triaging my email into folders now):
Add to Calendar (2)
BlogStuff (447)
Events (52)
Interview requests (59)
Mom stuff (6)
Stuff I haven't triaged yet (199)
Stuff for PodTech (115)
Business Stuff for PodTech I still need to answer (129)
Requests (usually tech support for Microsoft) (65)
Scoble Show (18)
Vloggies (6)
Whew, a lot of stuff.
I'm still very interested in hearing what you have to say... although recently you seem, like me, a bit overwhelmed by the pace of things.
Thanks for posting the cartoon =) Rock on.
But the real bottom line: any events in India are serious buzzkills.
You still have your cult power. But that "power" is isolated to a select smuggy geeky group, half of which will be indicted by the SEC...so don't let it goto your head. I'd cut off and do a contentish Podtechy blog...and keep the insider-baseball and rants to this blog.
Farm out your email load, get trusted associates to comb thru and daily brief...be Corporate and Presidential about it...
A good blog should be interesting in the same way that any other media is interesting; i.e. original, quality content.
http://boogerblog.wordpress.com
Booger
I rarely go to any geek events on weekends --gotta get away.
The aspect I liked the most when you were at MS was all the interesting people I would meet through your videos.
Just plain text on the blog all the time gets a bit dull some times. I just don’t feel part of it any more.
Would be great to get your comments on this…
Vloggersations.
You seem to take more of a shotgun approach to blogging. Somedays you post as many as ten (!) entries (August 28, in recent history). I personally find this a bit exhausting, so I pretty much just scan the subjects for interesting keywords (which is all anybody should be expected to do, I guess - but on other blogs the title may be gibberish and I'll still read because the signal to noise ratio is much higher).
Whereas some blogs seem like 99% editorial filters, yours is more of a reflector dish. Too blinding to click through, at times.
Is your email deluge the reason why I haven't heard back from you about my problem with Hi-MD audio encryption and a duff disc?
I hope that your interest in finding problems to solve might get you in touch with me :)
Philip
It's happening again -- keep your eyes on the real -- you are so right to look to make the right people connections.
Cheers
Al
Someone needs GTD ;-)
After you linked to my site about the scraper, my site visits soured, so did the comments on that post :)
Thanks!
If anything was important, they'll e-mail you again :-).
One thing that has remained consistent about people with power: they all lose it eventually.
So if can't handle, burn down the place? And that's assuming the other "important people" aren't super busy themselves, deleting is not a solution. Proper management of is...
The answer to a busy schedule is time management not the elimination of all appointments.
That's just what a startup needs.... :)
Booger
Try adding up the number of words you've written in, say, the last two weeks. It's a lot. Possibly too much.
oh yeah, we're Keepin' it Real(tm) over here.
Haven gotten some links of you they all resultet in different clickbehaviour - some strong, some not.
I'm stating it extremely, but that's in effect what's happening. When you were at Microsoft you were blogging about Microsoft and things that affected it as well as about your life. That didn't change and so over time you came to own that blogspace. You were the default for that category. Now you're blogging about some main thing which switches every week or so at least, because what you're actually doing switches. That means you start to gain people in that field, but then you start to lose them when you switch to another field.
The only solution to this is to be Robert Scoble, not the brand, the blogger, the individual. It's the writing and the thinking that you do that will bring back the people you pick up in your bloggy travels. You've got it; have faith in it and use it.
Gawd knows I am the farthest thing from a techie. It took me THREE YEARS to learn how to paste a picture into a forum. But I read you because you think and discuss the larger issues of the blogosphere, like this one, and you do it with humility, openness, and intelligence. I don't always agree with you, but I always respect you.
What's juice, and does it matter? It's not heart, and heart is worth more in the long run. Remember "Love is the Killer App?" Well it is.
If my blog is good, I may retain a fraction of those new readers. A TINY fraction. The quality of any individual post is almost meaningless to a blog in terms of retaining readers. It's the topics explored over time and the quality of that exploration that will bring people back.
If I may overanalyze, I think there's been some unsteadiness in your tone recently; nothing I can put my finger on, but it seems like we never know what we're going to get recently, in terms of tone or subject matter. Once your life settles down a bit more, it seems natural that your self-expression in the blog will as well, and that will bring them back. I'm sure you'll see a spike soon enough.
My Dream Media Team
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2005/12/my-dream-med...
Rob
Don't blog about blogging, or bloggers or anything else terribly meta. Just pretend there's absolutely nothing new, exciting or unusual about the process of blogging. Instead, write like you're telling your friend about something cool you've found (50%), or like you're having a nice chat with yourself (50%).
That includes not worrying about what you listeners think - they're your friends after all, right?
2. Figuring out what's relevant means getting rid of everything that isn't.
This may well include 70-80% of your email, though I suspect you get more interesting stuff than me.
3. Focus.
Talking about something coherently means not talking about a million other things. Tough luck. It's called the blogosphere for a reason, those other guys want to come up with something interesting too from time to time.
4. Don't burn out.
Sit back and take a deep breath. If you went hiking in the Rockies now for a week, web 2.0, the blogosphere and the tech industry would still be there once you came back. Provided that you still felt like writing and talking about that stuff, nothing at all would have changed.
It's that simple.
And people are using more aggregators and keeping track of blogs that interest them
Now there are a lot more journalists, sales guys, PR folks apart from techies who are blogging. In fact in the list of most linked Indian bloggers the technoloogy bloggers are probably less than 10%.
But you have a few issues because of the shear quantity hitiing your listening channels.
Sounds like you have an itch to scratch, remember the open source adage scratch that itch for yourself.
I would move away from the old school email as it is highly inefficient for these sort of quantities.
I would also think about using your community to help create a social software that helps filter your (public) incoming information feeds. Create a companion site dedicated to this filtering have your community vote/rate on incoming streams based on categories, let the social effects move the interesting stuff to the top and then concetrate on those. A kind of social blog where the subject matter is decided by the adience/community.
'Use the force Robert'
good luck
regards
Al
2. I think LayZ has it nailed: GTD
3. It's not you, it's the bubble. We're close to (beyond?) saturation point with incremental me-too variations aimed at solving the same small number of problems. The payoff for your readers in checking them all out is diminishing. Point only to things that deliver exceptional new value.
4. The audience for a "Tech Geek Blogger" might be a subset of the audience for a "Microsoft Geek Blogger."-- or it might be the same audience, but with diminished interest.
5. You have a finite amount of you to invest--you're going to need to allocate carefully between the thing you built (this blog) and the thing you're building (your show and PodTech). Granted, there are synergies and the two things can nourish each other, but that only makes it easier to avoid making the required choices. As you say video takes a lot more time than text. Therefore...
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/have...
that looks liek a happy face. i think this is interesting....cause it is so mysterious! look for it just under your header image just under the "Sc". cheers
PS as someone famous once said... "if you are worried about being boring well then darling you are...."
Don't be so hard on yourself. You're still as great a blogger as ever. It's not you.
It's the BRAND.
Before, you were the uncensored voice of Microsoft. You were more than the fly on the wall of MS. You were the guy who let the world know all the cool things MS was doing, and a lot of the stuff they weren't. Who else could ask for Flickr in Redmond or tell us the real deal on Origami?
The same thing would happen to Matt Cutts -- another fantastic blogger whose popularity correlates directly to his role at Google. Take Matt out of the plex and he would still write great stuff and do videos on SEO. A big part of his appeal, though, is his ability to provide the real scoop on Big Daddy and tap into the massive Google Brain Trust. You've got a tougher road than, say, journalists who leave a major daily because their sources don't dry up.
It's really tough to scoop someone who's 100% dedicated to getting a story in the mass media -- or a Drudge-like "blog-as-business." Plus, they can guarantee their sources wide distribution and in most cases syndication. You've got a business to run now and I'm sure revenue targets to meet as a direct result of your daily efforts.
You and Matt have created your own brands and have a group of readers who will continue to follow you no matter where you go or what you do.
You're like any player who gets traded by the Yankees. In pinstripes, they're the guys everybody loves to hate. Once out of the hated Yankees uniform, they can still be great players but they're not going to generate the same buzz in the media.
I may be wrong, but to find out, let's check in with Alex Rodriguez in a few years. In pinstripes, he's the most hated player in baseball even by his own fans. A day doesn't go by when he's not under the microscope in a way he never was as a lone Ranger.
I'm sorry but our influence largely comes from the people we keep company with. When you were with Microsoft, you were a window (pun intended) into the inside of Microsoft. Now? Microsoft does have many other blogs, but they have a very "corporate" feel. Yours did not. Now you represent a very small company that may or may not have an impact in the near future.
I am sad to say that I don't much care about what your new employer is doing. Video is video. It's the content that matters of course. Podcasting isn't yet doing things I care about, and that does make you somewhat less interesting to me. That's a PITY.