The First Church of Scoble 

You can't be on Twitter or FriendFeed and not be inundated with comments from and about Scoble. I don't know how he does it, but it's really annoying. I find myself relaxing when he takes a break from Twitter, for example to fly from Europe to the US. Finally I can speak without having everything one-upped by Scoble. Whatever it is, he's done it better, or bigger, or with more important people. It's irritating because I don't believe it. I'd really like it if he just turned down the volume. Or if there were a way to segment the Twittersphere, I'd like to be in the part where Scoble isn't the main topic of conversation 24-by-7.

That said, I heard that Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington were giving him a hard time on the Gillmor Gang, saying he was dumb to invest so much time in Twitter and FriendFeed. If he were blogging, they say, he'd be working for himself. On Twitter he's working for someone else. I've thought the same thing myself many times, but not about Scoble, since my whole existence does not revolve around Scoble. (I once parodied Scoble, in jest, saying that he was the next Christ, little did I know how prophetic it would turn out.)

So is Scoble a chump, and are all of the rest of us chumps, for not enhancing our own space, rather enhancing Ev's and Biz's and Jack, Fred and Bijan's space? If you don't run ads on your blog, I don't see how it matters. And if you primarily push pointers through Twitter, as I do, it's just a notification system, not where you pour your creativity. Even if you put ads on your blog -- it's like RSS, it feeds traffic to your blog, it isn't replacing your blog. Surely Calacanis and Arrington aren't advising Scoble to get rid of his RSS too?

In a hasty twit last night I said these guys were "ignorant" for this opinion, but maybe that was too harsh. But maybe they aren't being creative enough.

Technology is a process, an evolution -- don't focus on what's here right now today, because a year from now it'll be different. Look at the trend. In the last year Twitter hasn't changed much on its face, but it has changed in substance. I have a lot more followers now, and I follow far more people. There are a lot of PR people there now, where it used to be gossip. There are also a lot more tech entrepreneurs, analysts and carpetbaggers, people who think there might be a business model in here somewhere. They're largely adding clutter and noise, but that's change too.

But I can't imagine that blogging and Twitter won't fully merge, and I expect that to happen soon. Look at services like Posterous and Tumblr for a clue. Browsers have the ability to expand and collapse detail. Expect more of that. Services like Tweetree show that it's possible to include rich content inline with the twitstream. How far are we from having full blog posts? How far from being able to render the content in your own domain? How long until people think of the idea of a site aggregating the work of a handful of analysts as a quaint predictor of the rich world of the next-gen Twitter?

This is why I thought Arrington and Calacanis were missing the big picture -- seriously. Both have major investments in rollups of the pre-Twitter blogosphere. They may be suffering from the same kind of limited vision of their predecessors in the tech and business press, who were caught flat-footed by the generation of editorial content exemplified by their own offerings. Wouldn't be the first time that Generation N of tech failed to anticipate or even acknowledge Generation N+1.

Happy New Year! 

Good morning and welcome to 2009!

Lots of housekeeping...

Last night I saw Benjamin Button. Some people didn't like it, I can see not liking it, but I did like it myself. I'm a sucker for a love story. I empathize with Benjamin, he didn't fit in as a child, but he found people who appreciated him for who he is, not on appearances, and they stayed with him through his life. Something a lot of people want but don't have. I also liked that New Orleans played a role in the story, because I love the city, and it's been through a hard time, just like Benjamin. The last scene, the water rushing in to a basement where a clock that runs backwards is still running, is especially sweet. Not best picture, and if anyone gets a nomination for this movie it'll be Brad Pitt, but I think the real star is Cate Blanchett.