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Scoble vs. TechMeme

(Via Valleywag)

Robert Scoble today complains that TechMeme didn’t pick up on his story about Sun’s new blade servers, while Google News has picked up 23 sources:

The problem with that shift is that Google News already does “professional news” a lot better than TechMeme. For instance, do you find a single story about Sun Microsystems’ new blade servers on TechMeme? No. But you find 23 (and more coming every minute) over on Google News.

Well, I would say that is a good thing. Stories on TechMeme get picked up if enough bloggers write about them. Looks like most tech bloggers aren’t really that interested in server hardware.

Scoble has complained more than once lately that his PodTech videos don’t get picked up by a lot of bloggers. Maybe the reason for that is that a lot of people don’t feel like watching videos (besides that most people are not really interested in server hardware anyway). Maybe the videos just aren’t that interesting to most people? At times, Scoble gets some great access to facilities most of us don’t get into. His tour of Intel’s development fab was way too long, but it was still very interesting.

Hearing self-absorbed tech CEOs talk about their products just isn’t a very productive use of time for most of us.

Also, Scoble is a great blogger, but he isn’t the greatest interviewer or videographer.

Gabe Rivera of TechMeme probably had the best possible reaction to this:

BTW, I personally give the advantage to Techmeme on the blade server story, which sounds rather boring, something best passed over. Is the fact that you covered it for Podtech affecting your judgement in this case?

Technorati tags: techmeme, scoble, news, sun, robert scoble, gabe rivera

Funny enough that story is now on TechMeme. I guess it’s boring now?

As to my videos: they have been downloaded more than two million times (not counting the downloads I got at Microsoft). So +someone+ is watching them.

The Sun video was mostly a press conference where “professional” press were asking the questions, not me.

Robert – the posts on TechMeme right now are a Sun blogger and eweek. I would guess Techmeme’s algorithm assigns both a relatively high value. However, the story is parked in the “More Items” section and I would be surprised if it got any more play in the blogosphere tomorrow.

As for the videos: indeed, somebody is watching them, but I would argue that you could get just as many downloads with a show you released once or twice a week with high quality editing (kind of a best of Scoble)and maybe twenty minutes in length. There are too many videos to watch and with little distinction between the really interesting ones and the boring ones. If I can’t bank on a show to be good, I will stay away from it.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect what you are doing. I just prefer you as a text-blogger, not a video-blogger.