A friend of mine who has done some comedy in the past was over last night and we watched a couple Scoble videos. Most were nearly unwatchable due to a lack of editing, bad sound, poor video quality (there is no excuse for using a crappy cell phone camera to shoot a video if you want to be considered a professional), and rambling dialogue. We did see one interview with him (a video shot by somebody else) and in that one at least we could pay attention without being distracted by poor and amateur video. The interviewer had an agenda, and brought Scoble back on topic when he strayed and we both thought he made some good points about how to succeed in blogging.

BUT, I have very little interest in succeeding in blogging! I run some websites for others, but my own is basically an open journal where I can write and if you want to read it, great. If you don’t – then get packing. Scoble wants to “succeed” which basically means promoting himself and getting a zillion links out there pointing back to him, and commenting on anything tech with the goal (I guess) of eventually being picked to be a regular talking head on the weekly tech talk segment on TV? He’s too old for that – they like metro-sexual twenty somethings for that job it seems. How else might he “succeed”? Get paid to write articles about tech for magazines? Get a regular paying gig at C-Net or PC Mag? These guys get $500 an article (I’m sure Cringley has a nice deal, but how many Cringley’s are there?) and how many articles can you sell? Four a week? Might as well get a day job for that – at least you’d have health insurance. Maybe success for him could be ad revenue? I use Adblock and noscript – I’m not seeing them anyway. Write a book? I digress…

I’m more interested in the guys who actually *code*, the real inventors and creators of the shiny gizmos and nifty websites that Scoble and I are such obvious fanboys of than in hearing the inside gossip about the various company’s business strategy or which CEO said what. If I want to read or watch a segment about technology, I’d rather hear from the programmers or engineers than from some blogger idiot like me trying to figure out how to rip off other bloggers by increasing their “clickthrough”, OR I’d like to be entertained at least! Whether he likes it or not, Scoble is mostly an entertainer and the test of an entertainer is if your audience is yawning. I wonder how many of his “followers” are really interested in what he’s saying or if they’re mostly just trying to flutter around near him like moths in the hope they can parley that association into blogging “success” one day as well?