http://www.winextra.com/2007/08/30/playing-tag-with-the-sharks/

If you take the time to watch this video, and the three from last weekend, you’ll see he is just throwing his unvarnished ideas an opinions into the blogosphere, looking for input. He likes to start conversations. He’s often wrong, but doesn’t hesitate to try something new.

The point of putting these ideas in a video are to test the waters for using video for blogging real thoughts instead of putting them in text. It is a problem if you want to tag and search inside video.

I’m not a Scoble ditto-head, but at least give the guy credit for trying new things, placing his ideas out there for everyone to comment on, and accepting (some rather angry) criticism in a pretty rational fashion.

The blog of the future will have many permutations to many people, just like today. Personally I don’t think it’ll be much different – just new technology to solve the same problems. The real problem of blogs today is the successful proliferation of widgets and of advertising.

Heck, Robert starts out with a simple clean blog “slate” and then wants to add fancy gadgets to animate page and widget rendering shows that the “bling” aspect of blogs will not go away.

As long as there is money to be made, advertising won’t go away either. It’s up to all of us to push the boundaries and find better ways to present the content that we so dearly say we want to promote.

Ugh, I feel I just descended into another rambling, raving post… sorry everybody.

Regards,
Rick Mahn

Having said that though – Robert may not have the most read blog on the web – but he has certainly made a name for himself and anyone who can manage to stand out among all the bloggers in the world is obviously doing something right.

I respect Scoble, and count him an ally. But I disagree with this strategy.

I think blogs should, or at least can, be Micro Multi Mobile: micro-content, multi-media, mobile viewable.

Scoble also made a serious error putting his controversial message in a video, which is not parseable or searchable.

At least provide a text summary, if not a complete text version of such information.

1) http://www.ScobleShow.com. In the past year I’ve put up more than 300 videos, about 200 of which are with CEOs of various tech companies.
2) My Google Link blog. I read more than 800 blogs and share the best stuff (usually about 80 items a night). http://www.google.com/reader/shared/14480565058256660224

As to discussion about the UI. You don’t need to make it a Flash-based interface. I discuss that as a way to make the page cleaner by moving stuff onto other “blades”.

BTW Now I really want an iPhone!

I agree with you that the idea is nonsense. It’s a very Microsoft kind of idea, isn’t it? People will buy it because of how flashy it looks and then wonder why nothing works very well.