Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble

Born	(1965-01-18) January 18, 1965 (age 48) New Jersey
Occupation	Video blogger, Rackspace
Known for	Blogging, advocating technology
Spouse(s)	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.

1 Early life and education
2 Appearances
3 Milliscoble
4 Reception
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 External links

Early life and education [edit]

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]^{[non-primary source needed]}

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]^{[non-primary source needed]}

Microsoft [edit]

Scoble, Longhorn Evangelist

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.

Fast Company [edit]

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]

Rackspace and Building 43 [edit]

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. In 2012, Building 43 was re-branded as Small Teams, Big Impact.^[13]

Appearances [edit]

On April 1, 2008, The Register ran an April fool's spoof claiming Robert Scoble was actually an IBM bot.^[14]

On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show at NewTeeVee Live^[15] featuring other internet celebrities such as Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Cali Lewis, Kevin Rose, Justin Kan, and others.^[16]

On November 6, 2006, Scoble appeared as a panelist on a CSPA^[17] event called "The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing on Media and Marketing".^[18]

Milliscoble [edit]

In September 2008, followcost.com, a website which calculated how annoying it would 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.^[19]

Reception [edit]

Robert Scoble has received mixed reactions with his articles and videos, many of which are negative. He is credited with social media spam. ^[20]

Bibliography [edit]

Scoble, Robert; Shel Israel (January 2006). Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-74719-2. "We live in a time when most people don't trust big companies."
Foreword in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 2ed (2010)^[21]