Baus waves at Scoble

Christopher Baus suggests that Robert Scoble’s blog lacks focus and that his blog is mostly noise, “He’s always blogging about something, but really nothing at all “.

But Chris, surely that’s the point of Scoble’s blog? As Robert himself says “if you don’t think I’m taking you to enough cool blogs, or writing enough cool stuff, there’s a very easy solution. Unsubscribe.”.

I did that quite a while ago, but I’m glad he’s still out there and that other people subscribe to him on my behalf…

The trick is to use Scoble indirectly, subscribe to people with a focus that’s more to your liking but who pick up and repeat the occasional gems that he puts out.

There’s value in meta-blogging; you just don’t necessarily want to subscribe too close to the source…

When I first started blogging I used to subscribe to Scoble; I found a lot of quality blogs by following his links. Unfortunately it’s difficult to keep up with his output and, since he’s not especially interested in the things that I personally find interesting, much of what he blogs about is just noise to me… I don’t subscribe any more. I couldn’t keep up and, most of the time, I was simply marking everything as read and moving on.

Now I choose to subscribe to people further down the pyramid selling scheme that is “A-list” blogging… I’ve selected some blogs that provide content that I find interesting and I rely on them to report on the latest things that would interest me, much in the way I used to use the CIX conferencing system to filter usenet for me… My selection process acts as a filter so that I tend to see most of the ‘in things’ that I’d want to see and not be bothered by the stuff that I’m not likely to be interested in. I have a whole host of blogs that act as a filter between the torrent of postings that come out of Scoble, and me. Most of the time, the torrent of noise has become a trickle of signal by the time it gets to me, and most of the time it is signal that I’m interested in. No doubt my filter is completely different to other people’s filters; they’re interested in parts that I consider noise, etc…

So, Robert, please keep it up, just don’t expect me to subscribe directly…