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Meta-blogging (blogging about blogging about Scoble)

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 12 November 2006


"I hear things and I write about them…I just wrote something while we have been on the phone..about Windows Vista," Robert Scoble assured his interviewer.

In my time, I've had to interview people whose minds were clearly elsewhere. Niklas Zenstrom (Skype founder) once summoned me to Paddington Station for an interview, and then spent the entire time surreptitiously sneaking looks at his mobile email. And there was the famous time when Dennis Hayes kept getting up and leaving the room (his modem company was going into Chapter 11 at the time) - but I think Scoble takes the biscuit.

He's this week's "featured interview" on the cult SebRT blog, and Sebastian Prooth, obviously desperate to give the great man some space, asked him why he blogged. It's a good question, if you exclude the obvious answer ("people read it, duh") and the conversation went like this:

Why do you continue to blog? There must have been some dark times when you were thinking "why bother?"

Because I have something to say. I didn’t know that there was going to be money in it when I started. I wanted to be able to put things into Google and pull it out again. Bad times, well… [bad]Comments are sometimes assholes, never thought about quitting blogging. I have thought about disabling comments sometimes. I have thought about cutting back. I have thought about going Skiing instead of blogging. I..

You don't need his admission that "I wrote something about Vista while we were talking" to spot that the Scobelised One didn't have his mind on the interview. He seems to have some trouble distinguishing between his Microsoft-sponsored TV venture, Channel 9, and his recent venture into podcasting:

As a podcaster and blogger, I was pleased to see that you started podcasting a few months back. What made you think to do a podcast?

It was back at Microsoft. We were just sitting around after one of the big conferences. One day I wanted to share something I was watching with the internet. That led to Channel9. Now they are getting more than 4 million unique visitors a month on Channel9.

You can, it seems, be famous for being famous, even in the tech world... but surely, if you're going to agree to do a celeb interview, you should give an interview which makes you look like you've got an IQ approaching three figures?


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