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Shut Up, Twitter
Oprah's on Twitter, Twitter's on Oprah, and Everyone's So Excited!
We think we've figure out Twitter's big news tomorrow: Oprah Winfrey is joining Twitter. Here's the evidence. More » -
anniversaries
The Web at 20: Not Quite Old Enough to Drink, Yet Drives Us to It
Dear important scientist Tim Berners-Lee: Thank you for inventing the World Wide Web 20 years ago. It's really great and stuff! But were you aware of the crimes committed in your name? More » -
paradoxes
Professional Amateur Hater Andrew Keen Loves Robert Scoble
Andrew Keen has gone insane. The author, who has railed against the Internet for destroying our culture, now says we all must become self-promoting, Facebook-friending, constantly Twittering monkeys like unemployed videoblogger Robert Scoble. More » -
blogging for dollars
The Decline and Fall of Robert Scoble
Ignored in high school, the geek princes of social media now thrive on attention from eager fanboys (and calculating flacks). Relentless Fast Company egoblogger Robert Scoble was their king. Until he got dethroned. More » -
too insidery
Robert Scoble now reports to my ex-boss
This will be hilarious: Self-obsessed videoblogger Robert Scoble, managing director of FastCompany.tv, has a new boss — who's the same as my old one. Noah Robischon is leaving his job as managing editor of Valleywag's publisher, Gawker Media, to run Fast Company's websites, which include Scoble's personal blog, Scobleizer.com. More » -
halloween
No costume? No problem
Some readers have told us our Halloween masks were a little too frightening. If you're still scrambling to pull together a costume, here are four options that are more treat than trick. Best of all, you'll be able to get what you need from your own closet. More » -
meltdowns
Valley blowhards gush forth advice
Professional annoyance Kara Swisher, the BoomTown blogger, went to a how-to-survive-the-downturn gabfest, and all she got was this lousy video. Captured on her Flip camera: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who didn't predict the downturn; Nirav Tolia, the Epinions cofounder — an entrepreneur — who hasn't laid anyone off since the last bubble burst and is surely rusty; Google investor Ram Shriram, who has way too much money to care about such mundane affairs as a recession; and Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, who is cheerfully clueless as ever. The bright side: If Scoble is saying companies need to conserve cash, perhaps we've hit a market bottom. -
bad advice
John Doerr to startup CEOs: Be more like Scoble
Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr is the guy everyone vaguely remembers as being important a decade ago but can't recall anything he's funded recently besides Friendster. Even so, he's full of advice for entrepreneurs — so full of advice that his 10 tips for startups spilled over to 11. The 11th tip: "Overcommunicate with everyone -– employees, investors, partners and particularly customers. Don’t sugar coat things, communicate your resolve." Where have we heard that before? More » -
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layoffs
Fast Company publisher to lay off 20
Times are tough all over. That's the excuse bosses are now using for cleaning house, making hard decisions they were too timid to execute in bubblier times. We've just heard that Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Fast Company and Inc. magazines, is laying off 20 people. Inside the company, it's being spun as an "economic move" — but if it's a financially motivated maneuver, why is Fast Company magazine being left untouched in the layoffs? More » -
death of print
Scoble kills newspapers
"What's killing the newspaper business — with thousands of jobs lost and even the Washington Post Co.'s reporting its first loss in 37 years — is its inability to reach people like me." — Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, in a column some Fast Company editor wrote for him, in which Scoble goes on to relate all of the ways he obsessively consumes newspaper articles online. -
We Listen to Robert Scoble So Cisco Employees Don't Have To
No one told Cisco employees Scoble was talking to them
Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, embracer of new technologies and young women, has informed Twitter users everywhere that he is "talking to all Cisco employees this morning ... about the latest Web collaboration stuff." Whom he has not informed: Cisco employees everywhere. "My inbox and trash have no mention of 'scoble' anywhere," a Cisco worker bee tells us. Well, duh — the announcement must have gone out on FriendFeed. -
We Read FriendFeed So You Don't Have To
Scoble blames you for the breadlines, Tony
FriendFeed is the best Scoble-tracking technology ever. Without it, I'd never have caught his blurt-out reply to PopTech conference cofounder Anthony Citrano: "Breadlines are coming and I'll personally blame people like you ... celebrating on the backs of the working suckers who will now get laid off." Hey, I'm one of those working suckers. Writers don't get laid off — we get unpublished in advance. -
lists
The Scoble 165 — you're not on it
If you follow Robert Scoble at all — and you sort of have to unless your DSL is dead — you know he can't help overproliferating everything he does. While the entire staff of Vanity Fair takes months to assemble its 100 most powerful list, Fast Company's token webhead spews 165 names in one pass for his "hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding." Robert, let me put on my old Condé Nast editor's hat and redline this back to you: GREAT START, BUT PLS TELL US WHO THE FK THS PPL ARE: More » -
robert scoble
How to build your brand as an Internet addict
"The more you participate the more people will subscribe to you ... or like you," promises Fast Company teleblogger Robert Scoble, whose answer to "How do I build my brand?" starts 20 seconds into this one-minute clip. My 15-word version: If you spend all your time on FriendFeed, you'll be a big deal. On FriendFeed. -
blogging for dollars
Another naked conversation with Scoble
JAMESON'S IRISH BAR, BOSTON, MASS. — If you'd gotten over that unclothed photo of Robert Scoble and Naked Conversations coauthor Shel Israel, here's a new one to haunt your memories. Scoble, Fast Company's pet videoblogger and social media guru, was in Boston for the EmTech conference, and he wanted to go to a bar. Why? So he could sit at a table and ignore everyone around him, constantly reloading FriendFeed, the Web-activity tracker on which he relentlessly documents his nonparticipation in the world which surrounds him. Two startup executives who had just watched the Red Sox play at Fenway Park with Scoble told me he Twittered nonstop through his visit to the Green Monster. The only time he was separated from his iPhone? When he lent it to me to take a picture of him. That didn't turn out, but I found another pic Scoble had taken of himself, fresh out of the shower. -
we read twitter so you don't have to
Robert Scoble hugs the hate from his blog nemesis
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — As Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons obsessed over Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble. Who is he? Where did he come from? Why won't he shut up? Why won't people in Silicon Valley shut up about him? All those questions melted away when Scoble and Lyons pressed the flesh at MIT's EmTech conference. -
EmTech
A gigantic picture of Robert Scoble for no reason
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, who has discovered in the Web a popularity which escaped him in high school, has been moderating a panel titled "Web 2.0/Web 3.0 Mashup" at MIT's EmTech conference for the past hour. There are people from Facebook, Six Apart, and Plaxo on stage with him. With no introduction, Scoble launched into a meandering conversation about data portability, online video, URIs, social TV guides, and the Olympics. An hour later, it still has no sign of going anywhere. Joseph Smarr of Plaxo talks very fast. Dave Morin of Facebook seems very tired. Sample quote: "The pace of change is not indexable from a central service." The audience appears to be stunned into stupor. Does it matter that nothing is being said? Perhaps not; perhaps the point is to show this audience of technology generalists how insubstantial the obsessions of the Valley's geek set are. -
caption contest
This Hard Drive sponsored by Seagate
Looks like Robert Scoble wants his old job as Valleywag's mascot back. Think you can make more fun of the ubiquitous, flaxen-haired vlog flogger? Snark away in the comments, and your contribution could become the new headline. Yesterday emnem walked away with the win for "IE 8: Melts in your PC, not in your glass." (Special bonus for getting the blink tag to work.) (Photo by Brian Solis, bub.blicio.us) -
the 250
Demi Moore and Robert Scoble's moment of mutual unrecognition
Just how isolated are tech pundits like Robert Scoble from the real world? In a telling moment at a "VIP" party for TechCrunch50, Michael Arrington's startup conference taking place this week in San Francisco, an attendee tried to explain Scoble's notoriety to fading film star Demi Moore. Moore was on hand to promote her hubby Ashton Kutcher's new Web show Blah Girls. The actress, like most of America, had never heard of the ruddy, flaxen-haired Fast Company videoblogger. More surprising was Scoble's confession that he hadn't recognized Moore, either. Which makes me think of a new motto for the 250, Valleywag's term for the Valley's self-appointed, self-obsessed inside crowd: "You don't know us, and we don't know you." (Photos by AP/Evan Agostini and Shannon Clark) -
mythbusting
Why sponsoring bloggers is a waste of money
Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work. More » -
self-promotion
Valley's alpha geeks vie for Obama's CTO spot
It's a given among most blue-state intellectuals that Barack Obama will take office as president in January. That means looking past November's election to next year's Obama-tunities in Washington, D.C. The most obvious slot for aspiring Valley vets would be Obama's promised new position of national chief technology officer. A CTO slot has been one of Obama's talking points for months, but today reliable pot-stirrer Robert Scoble cracked the worm can open by throwing a list of names onto his blog: More » -
blogging for dollars
Bloggers to PR: U make me sammich
According to the latest round of echo-chamber essays, PR people are now irrelevant to the tech industry unless they completely reinvent themselves. But how? Robert Scoble's Illiad-length roundup post links to everyone and rehashes everything, yet arrives at nothing. Scoble and his blog buddies want PR people to enter into vaguely defined high-maintenance relationships with them. What they're afraid to come out and say: Buy us lunch. Really, it sucks reading press releases on an empty stomach. (Photo by AP/Larry Crowe) -
caption contest
Ten cameras, and none of them captured the real story
Rielle Hunter videotapes a John Edwards interview amidst the evil mainstream media on the morning of Edwards's official announcement of his failed bid for the Democratic Party's nomination. Write your own caption for this post and we'll use the best one as its new title. Friday's winner is godospoons for "Honey, you're not John Battelle!"(Photo by Robert Scoble) -
blogging for dollars
Rielle Hunter caught on Robert Scoble's camera
Robert Scoble did in fact capture some footage of John Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, back in 2006 when flying with the campaign's blogger party plane. The problem: All of the tapes are property of PodTech, the videoblogger's former employer, so all he can release are the still images, like this one of Hunter seated with Edwards. More » -
politics
Did Robert Scoble film Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter?
Rielle Hunter, the now-acknowledged mistress of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, was paid $114,000 by his political action committee to film and produce four YouTube videos, making her the most overpaid videoblogger in the business. We called the second most overpaid videoblogger in the business, Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv, for insights. You see, the Edwards campaign invited Scoble to blog the Edwards campaign back in 2006. More » -
blogging for dollars
Tech insiders learn the outside sucks
"I am really trying to get off of the PR bandwagon," declares the formerly PR-friendly Robert Scoble. "We write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon," gripes Web 2.0 event regular Sarah Lacy. You see, neither Scoble nor Lacy got one of the secret advance "pre-briefings" from overhyped search engine Cuil prior to the site's launch on Sunday night. So they didn't get to lead the charge of Cuil is kewl! announcements, nor the backwash of Umm, maybe not retractions. Don't dismiss the pair's lengthy posts as sour grapes. More » -
nowpublic
Robert Scoble, other Valley bon vivants subject of latest ego-stroking linkbait
Vancouver-based NowPublic is ostensibly all about citizen journalism. But since Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to it and signed up as an advisor, it's becoming better known for publishing flattering lists of "influencers," supposedly ranking them according to various social media metrics. The first "Most Public" list focused on New York, but a new list for the Valley and San Francisco is "coming soon." And by virtue of being included in the latest edition, we received an early copy as a press release. Who comes out on top? Ubiquitous attention slut Robert Scoble, naturally. Full list after the jump. More » -
caption contest
My First Scoble: Complete with mini hi-def camera and Web 2.0 fanboys!
If there's a lens, egoblogger Robert Scoble's in front of it. But who's behind it? Rocky Barbanica, the cameraman who Scobleizes the Scobleizer. In this photo, he shows off a pint-sized, plastic version of a much younger Scoble. Can you think of a better headline? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: "China commemorates attack on Olympian Nancy Kerrigan " by theodp. (Photo by Brian Solis) -
100-word version
Why tech blogging sucks
We rarely miss a chance to pick on relentless egoblogger Robert Scoble. But today, RoboScoble is hurting, and his hurt hurts like our hurt. Only his hurt runs about 2,000 words longer. How has tech blogging failed Robert since the halcyon days of 2003? Here's the executive briefing: More » -
caption contest
Does that sandwich come with an RSS feed?
Snarfd's Chris Baskind submits to us this image: the miraculous appearance of egoblogger Robert Scoble's face, charred into the side of a grilled-cheese sandwich. A miracle of the Church of Scoble, or just a Photoshop worth bowing too? Whatever you believe, give us your best caption. The winner will become the post's new title. Friday's winner is mrfomoco with: "What's that, girl? You have an implanted memory of Timmy being stuck in the old well?" -
acquisitions
PodTech sells for $500,000, which will hopefully cover its debts
PodTech, the online video startup left to reliving better days when charming shill Robert Scoble was a frontman for the company, has found a buyer, ViewPartner, and for the paltry sum of $500,000. Hopefully the company's creditors will be getting more than a few pennies back on their dollars — the company has been at the mercy of their bankers, and one commenter says that they were racking up tabs with vendors. VCs like US Ventures and Venrock probably won't be getting any of the more than $5.5 million invested in the company, however. Founder and chairman John Furrier must be relieved, as he was all smiles at recent reunion of DEMO conference attendees.(Photo by Brian Solis, bub.blicio.us) -
rumormonger
Robert Scoble's former employer PodTech about to get sold
PodTech, once described by Valleywag emeritus Nick Douglas as "the video podcast network apparently dedicated to screwing over as many people as possible without actually profiting from it," will be sending out a cheery press release touting its acquisition as soon as today, I've been told. The company has also been meeting with potential clients who are being told that the company's just fine, thanks. Except what did the acquirer buy? Not inexplicable geek celebrity Robert Scoble, who decamped for Fast Company months ago, and was the company's only real, if questionable, claim to fame. More » -
jimmy wales
Jason Calacanis picks fight in Palo Alto with missing Wikipedia founder
No, we did not head down to sleepy Palo Alto for the Search SIG meeting featuring small-time players like Mahalo, Wikia and Microsoft, but Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis seems to wish we did. But why bother going when we can get juicy quotes about Jimmy Wales, who founded for-profit Wikia after failing to figure out how to milk Wikipedia for cash from our home office? Those who tuned into Calacanis's Ustream live video channel got juicy quotes like "Guy's got an ethics problem" and "It's naive to think encyclopedias have anything to do with search"? while bemused Wikia representativeJeremie MillerNick Sullivan sat on the panel. (Wales didn't even show up) You stay classy, Jason! After the jump, a firsthand report from our tipster, including more of Calacanis's wit and wisdom. More » -
caption contest
Damn, forgot this job came with a side of Scoble
Valleywag's very special correspondent Paul Boutin is back, but could a meeting with Robert Scoble at Supernova presage Scoble's return as our mascot as well? Nah. Can you suggest a better headline? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "You're gonna need a warrant for that search, officer. Or a web browser." by ThatKid. -
OutCast Communications
At OutCast CEO Dinner, Robert Scoble greeted us warmly
FERRY BUILDING, SAN FRANCISCO — Let's be clear: Local PR firm OutCast's CEO Dinner event Thursday night wasn't really a dinner — most people ate standing up. Nor were there many CEOs. (I counted one: Jim Louderback of Revision3.) It's a far cry from years past where the decimated post-bubble survivors of San Francisco's tech press corps would gather in a room and listen to OutCast clients like Gordon Eubanks of Oblix, a salty former submarine officer, utter zingers about the wonders of Viagra. OutCast is a sizable firm now, and it's got big clients like Facebook and Yahoo. But Mark Zuckerberg? Jerry Yang? Nowhere to be seen. Instead, you had a hall full of hacks and flacks. I wonder how many of them shook videoblogger Robert Scoble's hand? Photo gallery after the jump: More » -
we read twitter so you don't have to
Robert Scoble moonlighting with Revision3
Ubiquiterrifying new media maven Robert Scoble will be filming yet another show, FastWork.tv, out of the Revision3 studios in San Francisco. >He announced the move at a MediaBistro event in New York yesterday, where Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback was also in attendance. I'm going to take a wild guess that the new show will be brought to you by longtime Scoble sponsor Seagate. -
caption contest
Our hero travels back in time to star in Breakfast Club 2
Before he turned into a Philip Seymour Hoffman clone, there was a time when Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble looked more like James Spader. And here we thought Scoble was a run-of-the-mill nerd before he found his videocamera! Thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers have not improved him. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments, and the winning one will become the new headline on this post. Thursday's winner: sample032, for "Google raises the stakes in competition with rival Baidu." (Photo by Steve Sloan) -
great moments in journalism
Say what you like about Robert Scoble, just get his name right
Fast Company videoblatherer Robert Scoble doesn't mind if you talk trash about him. But is it too much to ask that mainstream media outlets get his name right? Slate, owned by the Washington Post, calls him "Peter Scoble." Agence France Presse renamed him "Andrew." Why is "Robert" so hard to type? I don't know — I managed to screw up Scoble's first name once while blogging for Business 2.0. But it is telling on one point: Scoble may be a household name in the office parks of Silicon Valley, but everywhere else, he's a Joe Everyman whose name isn't even worth getting right. Let's just start calling him "Scooby," as his Fast Company colleagues do. -
great moments in journalism
Never mind the thousands dead, will China quake delay iPhone shipments?
A News.com reporter covered the death toll in 28 words before spending the next 613 trying to figure out if the recent earthquake in China near the manufacturing hub of Chengdu would hurt multinational technology companies. Which is only slightly less tasteless than the conversation which broke out on tech news tracker Techmeme — where the conversation revolved around Robert Scoble shouting "first!" You stay classy, technosphere. -
caption contest
This picture brought to you by Seagate
Schmoobiquitous videoblogger Robert Scoble, now filming interminably long clips about nothing for Fast Company, can take absolutely no credit for the jump in print advertising that landed the magazine on AdWeek's Hot List. But "Scooby," as his new colleagues call him, was at Prana in SoMa anyway, acting like the party the magazine's ad staff threw was for him and him alone. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. Yesterday's winner: "You know how to whistle, don't you?" by Peteski. (Photo by Brian Solis, Bub.blicio.us)



































