Robert Scoble recently spoke at Mediabistro Circus in New York where he talked about the “World-Wide talk Show” which, according to Robert, is the never ending stream of messages, comments and discussions that take place on the internet, 24 hours a day. It’s a neat idea and does much to sum up the fact that geography is now no longer a barrier to conversation and that at any given time there is always a discussion going on that may interest you - some may argue that, like Henry Ford’s ‘you can have any colour as long as it’s black’, you can have any conversation you like as long as it’s about the internet!
All well and good, you may say, that technology can be utilised to strengthen or create social bonds in an asynchronous, always-on fashion . And indeed it is. My worry is that in coining the phrase Robert, and a few others like him, are seeking to directly relate the internet model of a ‘talk show’ to it’s, arguably, poorer cathode ray, old media cousin in that all talk shows need a host.
Robert, as anyone who is aware of his considerable online presence will attest to, is a “noise junkie” and a journalist who reports for Fast Company TV on developments in technology. Robert follows 23 thousand people on Twitter, c 12 thousand on FriendFeed and loves to “drinking from a fire hose” of information. But a criticism that has long been leveled at Robert is that, in fact, he likes nothing more than when he is at the centre of the conversation.
I remember watching a video where Robert admitted to ‘linkbaiting‘, which, it can be argued, is deliberately saying something contentious in order to ‘bait’ people back to your website (unfortunately I couldn’t find this video again so if anyone knows the one I am referring to, feel free to send me a link). However, I am now worrying that this practice, and his constant need to be at the vanguard of the ‘new hotness’, is mutating into a need to be the story rather than report the story. I personally think that Robert isn’t actually a very good journalist: his posts are invariably filled with personal bias and hyperbole rather than sticking to measured research and fact. Granted this post is full of personal bias and hyperbole, but I’m not a journalist and I’ll come to my measured research in moment! 
Naturally the basis of for this post comes from an accumulating feeling of unease on how developments in new technology are being reported by those who, for whatever reason, have ended up in positions of great influence. However, my own tipping point, where ruminations convert to protestations, came with 2 incidents on FriendFeed a few days ago.
The first was the on-going story of scaling and outage problems for Twitter. To counter a criticism that Twitter has never been open enough in explaining what issues they are facing Twitter developer Alex Payne wrote a Q&A post detailing what the company has been going through. In reporting the story VentureBeat (no I hadn’t heard of them either) pulled out the following quote:
The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.
This, VentureBeat said, would, in the eyes of many Twitter users, point to Robert Scoble due to his excessive use of the system.
Switch to a combination of Robert’s blog, FriendFeed, Seesmic and (ironically) Twitter where Robert cries foul, claims that it’s atrocious for a company to blame it’s users for it’s problems, and shouts “Screw you, Twitter!“. The ‘world-wide talk show’ swings into action as numerous comments are posted in support or in opposition to Robert’s proposition; all the while ignoring that fact that Twitter, at no time, blamed Robert Scoble or anyone else for their problems. The measured, fact based approach is to see that in Alex Payne’s quote, Twitter felt they only had themselves to blame.
I, myself, along with Ian Betteridge and a few others tried to reason with Robert and point out the flaw in his argument. But by the time I tried to ask if his position was a deliberate attempt to position himself at the centre of a news story Robert, like Leno, Letterman, Wogan or Parkinson (for those of us in the UK) had simply moved on to next mildly amusing monologue as an intro to his next ‘guest on the show’. Ironically enough, when interviewing Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone later that very day, and broadcasting it via his Qik channel, the fire and brimstone fury of his earlier internet posts were absent as he laughed, joked and expressed his love for the company.
Last night (UK time) I noticed a Twitter message appear from Robert that said ““I’m “Liking” and “Commenting on” your Twitter messages. http://tinyurl.com/6dns7r — are yours interesting enough to rate?” (emphasis in bold mine). Now, I know that we all process any piece of information that passes our way through our own personal filters, rate it, and proceed based on the result i.e. does this interest me? Do I need to find out more? What action should I take? Do I need to comment on it? etc. But it seemed to me that in an attempt to highlight the “Comment” and “Like” features of FriendFeed Robert, again, was seeking to use his position to “make people feel that they need to be clambering for [his] attention”, and I pointed this out to him on the ensuing discussion on FriendFeed. It struck me as arrogant in the extreme that anyone should set them self up as the public “arbiter of quality” for anyone else’s messages. Again, when challenged the band played……and we’re “on to our next guest”.
I know that Robert will cry foul on this post too and, in essence, I only single him out as he coined the “world-wide talk show” phrase. There are others whose hubristic endeavors leave me just as cold. And to those that say I don’t have to listen them, and that I am free to ‘un-follow’ the likes of Robert Scoble at any time, I say this: I care enough about the developments in web-based technology to worry that when the outside world looks in at the supercilious way in which those self-proclaimed “hosts” behave, they’ll assume that the technology itself is just as facile.
Tags: Scoble, World Wide Talk Show, Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, Ian Betteridge, Alex Payne, Mediabistro Circus
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