Robert Scoble

MySpace isn't exactly a great example since many suggest its death spiral is due to their bet on Microsoft technology and .NET :)
http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-to-bets-on-los-angeles-and-microsoft/

I'm not sure Plenty of Fish is a great proof either (that .NET is good for a start-up) since it was built by just 1 man, who just uses Response.Write http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture/:

>> In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write...

Even as a long time .NET developer, I don't believe .NET is optimal for Internet Start-Ups. Most of the pro-web talent are in Ruby/Python/node.js camps where they enjoy first class support of all the popular web DSL's (e.g. less, sass, jade, handlebars, etc). As well as all the bundling, optimization and minification tools which were available for years in other platforms and have only recently been a supported option in .NET with System.Web.Optimization. The pro-web (Single Page App) community is relatively non-existant in .NET. E.g. none of the showcase apps on http://backbonejs.org (the most popular SPA JS fx) are in .NET.

The ASP.NET website packaging model doesn't scale (productivity-wise), since the larger the website becomes the slower build/iteration times get - which is especially important for start-ups. I do believe typed languages are better suited for typed back-end services - I just no longer believe in them for fuzzy…

Herein Scoble fulfills the "huge responsibility"[1] of getting a rare TED press pass by reminding us once again of how awesome it is to be Scoble. In a truly shocking turn of events, getting to attend has made him no longer jealous of people who get to attend. Sweet badges, networking with rich folk and stage decor that helps you "weave together a fabric that encourages your mind to explore new ideas" while staring off into space during a boring talk will do that to you, I suppose.

If I didn't know that this is just how Scoble writes about everything, I would have come away with a worse opinion of TED than I had going into it. TED is supposedly about "ideas worth spreading", not how awesome it is to be rich and white (or fashionably ethnic). If I wanted to know about things rich people do that I will never do, I'd watch My Super Sweet 16. It's no wonder they don't hand out more press passes.

I think the way to address complaints of elitism is to not. If being an exclusive event is how the sausage gets made, great. Reasonable people understand that the hype and pretense surrounding TED does not negate the value of the content that it produces. Reasonable people skip the unbearably pompous intro music and the punctuating two minutes of advertisement for things that rich people care about and simply enjoy the talks. Reasonable people don't care about how awesome it is to get into the exclusive club.

[1]:http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/a-ted-responsibility/

I've been following his blog for 6 months or a year, but I'm finding myself skipping over more and more of his posts, and am considering taking it out of my reader. Your question spurred me to look at what made me subscribe in the first page and what's changed.

I remember watching and really enjoying this interview with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson: http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/05/do-we-need-a-new-tech-literacy-behind-the-big-data-services-like-twitter-facebook-use/ I found Olson to be smart and interesting, and Scoble asked good questions. I was excited to learn more about what people were doing with big data and industrial NoSQL, and that interview was a great primer.

I also remember reading an essay of his on curation (http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators/) that I thought was really insightful... after all, curation is something he's an expert on.

That's around when I subscribed to him. If you go back to March/April/May of last year (http://scobleizer.com/404) he was writing lots of great, smart, important essays.

Lately, I feel like it's more like startup diarrhea. A flood of interviews and links and startups and random crap that he's testing out. I guess that's what you have to do when you're focused on "breaking" news. But at some point I just don't have the patience to wade through all of it for the good stuff.

Ironic reason for unfollowing an expert in curation!

Why are we writing to please Google?

Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See:

http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494

It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb.

The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve.

IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there.

http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.

Maybe Robert Scoble was prescient [2009].

"Here’s the phases of Facebook:

Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-listened-and-why-it-definitely-wont-start-now/

> The takeaway from that is that the social features are really the killer part of this,” Zuckerberg told me. “Having good social integration is more important than high-res photos.”

Look at the rapid rise of Instagram. If you make a product that makes you appear cooler to your friends and followers, you can attract a lot of users quickly.

[1] "Previously, Instagram reported 100,000 users in its first week post launch. The startup is now said to be close to the 1 million mark"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20101203/tc_mashable/instagram_now_seeing_two_to_three_photo_uploads_per_second

This isn't strictly a web application, but if you are a Java programmer then one project I'd recommend would be integrating the Twitter Search API with FreeMind for the purpose of facilitating real time curation of tweets. Real time curation is apparently the number one request for software that the twitter people get, and FreeMind is the ideal platform for curating tweets. All that's needed is a way to intelligently get tweets into FreeMind so that they can be quickly sorted appropriate buckets, and since FreeMind is written in Java it might be a good fit in terms of skill set and project size.

To give an example of how this would be used, the project described above would reduce the time of making this from about seven hours to about an hour: http://www.squidoo.com/Hacking_Education

Also, here are two relevant blog posts:

http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators/

http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/curate-for-me-an-idea-for-a-simple-web-service/