Robert Scoble: in focus

Scoble isn’t dead! He's in Videography Valhalla

When Robert Scoble left Microsoft, most of his detractors thought he would disappear, evaporate, involute, go somewhere the sun don't shine etc. etc. especially when he announced he was going to join a tiny, relatively unknown startup.

Yet after he left Microsoft, his ‘Technorati top 100 blogs’ ranking soared.

There are plenty of respected people who think Scoble is a complete idiot - but we don't

He calls himself a "Geek Blogger" but lots of 'real' geeks refuse to recognise his qualifications as a geek, because as far as they are concerned, he has no technical knowledge that anyone but a non-geek would respect

He talks up Web 2.0 incessantly, which is enough to get the die-hard 'realists' among the technology community to throw chairs

He wrote a book which seems to offer blogging as a panacea, something which many (especially blogging-sceptics in the journalistic and IT management fraternities) find ludicrously naive

Despite his apparent naivety, he is pretty smart, in a kind of intuitive, rather than intellectual way, he thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, but there is nothing ordinary in the effect he has on people, there's more to his charm than just charm

Why? Here's 9 reasons why:

• NOT because he wrote a book on business blogging: other bestselling blogging book authors aren’t up there.
• NOT because he created Microsoft’s Channel9, the pioneer in corporate video blogging: many other leading video bloggers are still nowhere to be found in the A-list (yet).
• NOT because of who he used to be: ‘The man most likely to get fired for blogging against his employer’ or ‘The man most likely to leak Microsoft secrets’ (he is writing less and less about Microsoft these days)
• BUT BECAUSE the blogosphere seems to run like blood in his veins: he ‘emotes blogospherically’
• BUT BECAUSE he has a good ‘nose’ for a blogosphere-provoking headline (he is an arch link-baiter)
• BUT BECAUSE he intuitively knows how to grab the interest of the a-list
• BUT BECAUSE he has personally met most of the a-listers face to face many times (offline conversations are the fuel for online conversations, because they ‘secure your commentosphere’)
• BUT BECAUSE he knows (intuitively) how to balance the relevance-requirements of his content (biographical, occupational and institutional) to maximise trust
• BUT BECAUSE, unless you find everything to do with metablogging to be of little interest, Scoble is rarely if ever boring (in fact, if the subject is obscure, or if he says something predictable, his commenters inevitably liven things up by tormenting him mercilessly!)

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