11
June
2006
|
15:55 PM
America/Los_Angeles

At Vloggercon to welcome Robert Scoble to Silicon Valley...

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Photo by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.




. . .I usually try to keep my weekends geek-free but Sunday afternoon I popped into VLoggerCon, the conference for video bloggers. As soon as I walked in Robert Scoble almost walked right into me, which was handy because I was instrumental in breaking the news that the top blogger in the tech community was leaving Microsoft after Andy Plesser from Beet.tv called me with the news and published it on Beet.tv..


He looked very happy. We walked outside and talked for a few minutes. I welcomed him back to Silicon Valley and congratulated him on his move to PodTech.net, the leading podcasting network.



061106_Robert_Scoble_joins_PodTech_thumb.jpgRobert was buzzing, he had a grin as wide as the Golden Gate bridge. I told him the move was very good for his media brand, but this is stuff that he knows very well. There are some things bloggers understand very well and the key one is they know they are building a media brand and they know the ultimate value of such brands.


Robert said he officially starts at PodTech.net on July 5th. I think he'll be very happy here in Silicon Valley. Here is where the conversations are, and there are many conversations.


. . . I know that MSFT is full of really smart people but the isolation of the Redmond campus can't be good for Microsoft. Here in Silicon Valley there are far more people that will challenge your ideas and that makes for better ideas.


Every time I see Robert in Silicon Valley he is surrounded by people he already knows very well from his long time tirelessly travelling and advocating the power of blogging. He has been one of our best evangelists so it is great to see him back in Silicon Valley because the valley is coming back, and it will come back in a very big way (although not where most of the VC money thinks it is...).


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Robert's wife Maryam will also be working at PodTech.net, a savvy move for John Furrier, the CEO of PodTech.net.


. . . I congratulated John Furrier on the hire of such a hot media property.

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I said you've just acquired millions of dollars in publicity by hiring Robert Scoble. He just grinned and said that a top story in the Wall Street Journal was not bad.


Not bad at all. Yes, we had the story up by 5.45pm on Saturday and it took the Wall Street Journal until the following mid-afternoon to follow it up, but that demonstrates the difference between most newspapers--which take the weekend off and leave a skeleton staff to monitor blogs and news wires--and the journalist bloggers, such as myself, who are on call all the time.


The main stream media journalists are going to have to work a lot harder because no journalist likes to be scooped, and then to have to credit bloggers--that really smarts :-)


I asked Robert Scoble how the news got out. "I was mouthing off about it, but I thought people wouldn't write it about it until Monday..." Tell a bunch of bloggers something and expect them to keep quiet about it is expecting far too much. Many of them don't know what an embargo is anyway.


. . . Andy Plesser and I had a very nice dinner at the Zuni Cafe after the conference and caught up on our families and work. Andy works in PR in New York city and is new to the video blogging sector but he has already attracted a lot of attention for his interviews.


We talked about how the new media is disrupting markets and allowing the fast and the adaptable to quickly establish new media brands, such as Rocketboom.


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BTW, Silicon Valley Watcher has an interview with the delightful Amanda Congdon from Rocketboom, which is bringing in $85k per week for five weekly five minute videos. (I'd keep quiet about the money Amanda :-)


. . .It was funny being at the video blogger conference because everybody had video cameras and everybody was interviewing each other! Or comparing their video cameras. (I'm on a Beet.tv interview.)

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Everywhere I looked, outside of the conference sessions (just down the street from me at the Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco), people were video interviewing other people and then changing partners.


beettvtom.jpgMe on Beet.tv. Photo by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.


And there were tons of people I knew, such as Chris Heuer of BrainJams, and it felt like I imagined the Homebrew Club might have felt in the early days of the microcomputer revolution, when there were just a few hundred early enthusiasts.


Dave Winer, the original blogger, of course was there, and on the microphone. He was talking about community and that he hoped we would be able to keep this community.


And I understood what he was saying because right now, it is a very cool, fun, small community all happening on our doorsteps. But as these technologies move into the mainstream and out of this small, geek engineering community it will change. And I'm not sure we can do much about that except to appreciate what we have today.


But, I know that those that start building their media brands sooner than later will do well in the new media world. You can already see it in the superstar status, and the increasing salaries of the top bloggers such as Robert Scoble, and Steve Rubel and the many other bloggers that have made a name for themselves in just a year or so.


These, and others, will become the Venetian princes of the new world :-)


. . .


Related:


Vloggercon San Francisco: Robert Scoble Speaks About Moving from Microsoft to PodTech.net


Press Release: Microsoft Robert Scoble Joins PodTech.net