Jan

28

What’s the Problem with Scoble?

January 28, 2007 |

I was thinking a bit more about the Scoble spat in the blogsphere right now and I am especially thinking about why Scoble doesn’t get more links. He says he produces two videos a day and gets very few links. I think the problem is with the fact that he is producing videos.

And don’t get me wrong, his videos are great and I have watched a lot of them, but a lot of them are just too long. The first Intel video is over 40 minutes long, yet one could summarize the content in a page or so.

You would miss out on a lot of things (such as my wife walking in the background somewhere around the second minute) and you wouldn’t get the awe effect of actually seeing the three football field long clean-room in the D1D fab, but you would still know that Intel is now producing 45nm chips and a link to the Intel press release would give you even more info.

YouTube is popular because the videos are short. They fit into our world of short attention spans and instant gratification. If Scoble had linked to the more produced and shorter third video PodTech did, maybe he would have gotten more links to it.

That is not to say that there aren’t other problems at work here and I think Scoble has it on a lot of those and clearly he has rattled a nerve here and there. But there might also be inherent problems with the long video form on the internet. But then he had copious notes in his post as well, so that could have been worthwhile to link to… well - I am just poking around loudly here…

Update: Looks like Mathew Ingram agrees. Scoble has a revealing comment on that post as well, he says he doesn’t edit his videos because something, somewhere could be of interest for someone. True, but that might leave a lot of viewers tired and bored. Why not offer a full version and a short, edited, to-the-point version?

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