First, let me say. Robert…Mr. Scoble…you’ve been under a lot of heat lately. I don’t want to add to that. You’ve been extremely graceful while under fire. BUT! Wow, do you miss the mark with your latest Kyte video about the “blog of the future.” Let me tell you why.

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If you don’t have time to watch the video, here’s the lowdown. Scoble says that blogs have become cluttered with ads, widgets, sidebar calendars etc. Lots of elements that take attention away from the central content of the blog. Up to this point I agree with Scoble. Then he goes TOTALLY AWRY!

Scoble suggests a blog interface where all of the sidebar bits (Facebook links, Twitter widgets etc) are relegated to “books” that zoom in and out similar to CoverFlow.

If you’ve never seen Coverflow, it looks like this:

How pretty! How very Iphone! How very useless and against the whole concept of a blog! Who are blogs for? Are they for the blogger or the reader? What Scoble describes is the ultimate personal homepage. I’d love to be able to see all my daily goodies on one easy-to-navigate page but this is not a blog. A blog faces outward to an audience. It should be easy to read, easy to navigate, and the text shouldn’t be buried in some snazzy Flash interface. My blog page isn’t perfect; there’s some junk on it but the purpose behind everything on it is to help the reader, not help me.

I know Scoble is brainstorming here and I think he has some good points but not to apply to blogs. I agree with him about the need for simplicity on the page so the content is featured but that’s about where the agreement stops. A blog should be simple, uncluttered and created solely with the reader/audience in mind.

Is it egotistical to think that readers are really dying to see your Facebook profile so easily? Or that they’re dying to be able to see your Flickr page without leaving your blog? There’s nothing wrong with linking to other iterations of your identity to allow your readers t find out more about you. Doing so contributes to your ethos and your trustworthiness but it should be subtle. Not “in your face.”

Blogs are not personal homepages. If we’re going to redefine how a blog would work best we need to keep two things in mind: 1) easy to write 2) easy to read. That’s it.

Back to the whiteboard, Scoble. Give it another shot.

Sincerely,

Intellagirl

What’s really new about this? It’s meant to advertise a free service: Gmail. A service which only makes money using sidebar ads, which I have NEVER clicked in the year+ that I’ve been using gmail but that’s beyond the point. Google understands that you can advertise the attitude of a service/product just as well as you can advertise the actual product. They understand that getting current users involved in the process increases their devotion to the product and that having thousands of people shoot 10 second videos is more financially smart that spending $1million on one commercial. Cheaper actually equals better!

I think it goes back to the old toothpaste ad adage. What does a toothpaste ad really sell?

Take this one, for example. It might have info about how the toothpaste can keep your teeth healthy (toothpaste = health) but what it’s really saying is Toothpaste = healthy teeth = beauty and success. It’s that leap from product to perceived impact that is critical to understand. But enough about toothpaste; let’s go back to Gmail.

So what the Gmail Behind the Scenes campaign is really telling us is gmail = fun with smart people. So not only can we use a great email service but we’ll be in the company of smart people (who doesn’t want that, right?) who do fun things (we all want to be fun!). Meanwhile, the campaign itself becomes another Google product because people are excited to submit something and watch what others have added. Oh, and to top it all off, the videos are all hosted on YouTube so Google gets to advertise another company they own at the same time. Brilliant!