- Robert Scoble
-
Robert Scoble 
Born January 18, 1965
New JerseyOccupation Video blogger, Rackspace Known for Blogging, advocating technology Spouse Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble Robert Scoble (born January 18, 1965) is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. He has three children; one from a previous marriage and two with Maryam. He currently works for Rackspace and the Rackspace sponsored community site Building 43. He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel.
Contents
Early life and education
Scoble was born in New Jersey in 1965, and grew up about a kilometer from Apple Computer's head office in Silicon Valley.[1]
In 1989 while studying in West Valley Community College he met Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, and persuaded him to donate $40,000 worth of Macintoshes to the college journalism department.[2]
In 1993 he dropped out without finishing his degree in Journalism from San Jose State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications (he still has one class to complete).[3][4]
Career
Scoble began his career in the 1980s helping run a discount camera store in San Jose (LZ Premiums). He sold cheap cameras with small or no profits, but made money from accessories.
After college he was working for Fawcette Technical Publications (as anything man - design, editing, helping plan the conferences like VBITS and VSLive!). His current wife Maryam was also working for Fawcette.
During the mid-1990s Scoble helped co-chair the Visual Basic SIG for SVForum, and was a frequent attendee and organizer for numerous local tech user groups.
In the late 1990s Scoble worked for Winnov (a manufacturer of webcams) supporting webcam users. During this time he was named a Microsoft MVP for his activity in Microsoft's NetMeeting support newsgroups, and for maintaining a NetMeeting information website.
He later left Fawcette and joined Dave Winer's UserLand Software, which was a content management and blogging software startup. He worked as a Director of Marketing. After the startup ran out of money, Robert worked for free for a month and eventually had to switch jobs.
He found a job at NEC Mobile Solutions as Sales Support Manager for TabletPC. His job responsibility was to answer all the phones and all the emails with support/sales requests. He had started using blogs to provide tech support and listen to feedback from NEC customers.
His blog was noticed by Vic Gundotra (then General Manager of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft), and Scoble accepted his offer to work at Microsoft.
Microsoft
Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist
Scoble joined Microsoft in May 2003. He was part of the Channel 9 MSDN Video team, where he produced videos that showcased Microsoft employees and products.
Although Scoble often promoted Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, he also frequently criticized his own employer and praised its competitors (such as Apple Computer and Google). He was unusual in the level of access he offered to his users, which included publishing his cell phone number on his blog and urging people to contact him directly with issues, as well as accepting comments on his blog. His support for Microsoft in his blog, however, drew controversy and in February 2005, he became the first person to earn the newly coined moniker of "spokesblogger."
The Economist described Scoble's influence in its February 15, 2005 edition:[5]
“ He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience ” On June 10, 2006 Scoble announced[6] he was leaving Microsoft to join Podtech.net as vice president of media development with a higher salary accompanied by "a quite aggressive stock option"[7] offer that could make him wealthy if his new company succeeded.[8][9] According to Alexa Internet that day had the biggest traffic to his blog and PodTech over their lifetime.[10] June 28, 2006 was his last day at Microsoft.
PodTech
In 2006 Scoble joined PodTech with the title Vice President Media Development. On Monday, September 25 he released his first episode of the "Scoble Show" at http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/.
Fast Company
On December 11, 2007, while taking part in a panel discussion at the LeWeb3 Conference, Scoble inadvertently leaked news (by loading up a post on TechCrunch) that he would be leaving PodTech on January 14, 2008, and was likely to join Fast Company. He acknowledged the news on his blog on December 12 but stated that he had not yet signed on with Fast Company. He did a video interview about his plans here and leased studio space from Revision3.
On January 31, 2008, Scoble dedicated all his photos to the public domain.[11]
On March 3, 2008, Scoble launched FastCompany.tv with two shows: FastCompany Live and ScobleizerTV. He characterizes the first as "a show done totally on cell phones." The second is similar to his previous show on PodTech, only with better equipment and a camera operator. The show is recorded with two cameras in 720p HD.[12]
Though he no longer produces videos for FastCompany, he continues to write articles for their magazine.
Rackspace and Building 43
On March 14, 2009, Scoble announced via his blog and on the Gillmor Gang that he was joining Rackspace. As part of his work there, he teamed up with the company to develop Building 43, a new content and social networking website.
Appearances
On April 1, 2008, The Register ran an April fool's spoof claiming Robert Scoble was actually an IBM bot.[13]
On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show at NewTeeVee Live[14] featuring other internet celebrities such as Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Cali Lewis, Kevin Rose, Justin Kan, and others.[15]
On November 6, 2006, Scoble appeared as a panelist on a CSPA[16] event called "The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing on Media and Marketing".[17]
Milliscoble
In September 2008 followcost.com, a website which calculates how annoying it will be to follow anyone on Twitter, invented the milliscoble unit of measurement defined as: "1/1000 of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble as of 10:09 CST September 25, 2008." At that time, Scoble was averaging 21.21 tweets per day, so a milliscoble is 0.02121 tweets per day. A person with a milliscoble rating of 1000 will be as annoying to follow as Scoble.[18]
Bibliography
- Scoble, Robert; Shel Israel (January 2006). Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Wiley. ISBN 978-0471747192. "We live in a time when most people don't trust big companies."
- Foreword in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 2ed (2010)[19]
References
- ^ Rubel, Steve (2004-04-29). "Q&A with Robert Scoble on Blogging, Media and PR". http://steverubel.typepad.com/micropersuasion/2004/04/qa_with_robert_.html. Retrieved 2006-08-26.
- ^ Scoble, Robert (2005-10-23). "Woz’s math puzzle". The Scobleizer Weblog. http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/10/23/wozs-math-puzzle/. Retrieved 2006-08-28.
- ^ Microsoft MainFunction (2005-11-18). "Meet Robert Scoble!". MSDN Academic Alliance Community Center. http://www.mainfunction.com/DotNetInAction/Technologies/display.aspx?ID=2862&TypeID=11. Retrieved 2006-08-28.
- ^ Scoble, Robert (2006-11-16). "Robert Scoble still need 3 credits to graduate". http://scobleizer.com/2006/11/16/playstation-3-mania-in-san-francisco/#comment-171470. Retrieved 2006-11-18.
- ^ "Chief humanising officer". The Economist. 2005-02-10. http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3644293. Retrieved 2006-08-26. An article that describes Scoble's role at Microsoft
- ^ Scoble, Robert (2006-06-10). "Correcting the Record about Microsoft". The Scobleizer Weblog. http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/correcting-the-record-about-microsoft/. Retrieved 2006-08-28. Robert posting about why he left Microsoft
- ^ "Blogger Scoble Quits Microsoft". Australian IT. 2006-06-12. http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,19443297-15306,00.html.[dead link]
- ^ "Top Microsoft Blogger to Resign". BBC News. 2006-06-12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5070940.stm.
- ^ Olson, Parmy (2006-06-12). "Ballmer's Microsoft Loses Admired Tech Evangelist". Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/2006/06/12/gates-microsoft-scoble-cx_po_0612autofacescan01.html.
- ^ "Traffic report for Scobleizer blog and PodTech.net". Alexa.com. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=podtech.net&range=2y&size=medium&y=r&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscobleizer.wordpress.com%2F. Retrieved 2006-09-11.
- ^ Putting photos into public domain
- ^ Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive FastCompany.TV launches «
- ^ IBM unveils nano-projector based VirtuaHuman with 1TB of memory | The Register
- ^ Web Video Celebrity Game Show — NewTeeVee Live
- ^ . http://www.forbes.com/businesswire/feeds/businesswire/2007/10/31/businesswire20071031005523r1.html.[dead link]
- ^ Chinese Software Professionals Association
- ^ The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing on Media and Marketing
- ^ "What's a milliscoble?". 2008-09-25. http://followcost.com/about/milliscoble. Retrieved 2008-12-04.
- ^ David Meerman Scott (2010). The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. (2 ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 0470547812. http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/books.htm.
External links
- Robert Scoble - Robert Scoble's Google+
- Scobleizer - Robert Scoble's weblog
- Scobleizer - Robert Scoble's Twitter
- Scobleizer - Robert Scoble's Show on Spreaker.com
- ScobleShow - PodTech.net's ScobleShow
- Robert Scoble interview at Le Web3 in Paris France December 2007 video
- interview with Robert Scoble at Le Web 2008-Paris (with YouTube video)
- The Scoble Effect by Mark Fidelman
Categories:- American bloggers
- Video bloggers
- Microsoft employees
- San Jose State University alumni
- 1965 births
- Living people
- Technology evangelists
- American podcasters
- American Internet personalities
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