![Bill Gates arrested Bill Gates](/IMG/blog/gates.jpg)
Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)
Foreword: I syndicated Robert Scoble’s blog for a few months in the past, mainly in order to keep an eye on Microsoft’s ‘software politics’ and developments. I thought I would see the nicer face of an aggressive corporation, but I soon dropped it like a hot plate.
consider very few things to be “shocking”. There are very few things as adverse-to-logic and even shocking as Robert Scoble using Firefox and running his blog on WordPress (LAMP technology). This has been the case ever since his so-called ‘Net dad’ had weblogs.com
sold out to VeriSign — a rather evil company. Scoble is a Microsoft evangelist, but he decided to practically infiltrate a world of Open Source. At some stage, it ended up badly.
Before Scoble became Dave Winer’s ‘surrogate child’, he wasn’t doing anything too admirable, but he was among the first people to blog. Then, years later, he would rave about ‘RSS this and RSS that’. It was Winer’s technology. Scoble only understands computers as a user, rarely realising the underlying issues in depth. He is no developer and no great writer either, yet his reputation and momentum, as well as being outspoken and critical of Microsoft while being paid by them is what makes him somewhat exceptional. His reputation is overrated.
When it comes to technology, I found that Scoble cannot tell his ass from his face. Microsoft employed him only because of his Web statistics. It is a public relations trick — companies buying readership (through popular voices) and promote propaganda to improve the Windows brand name and image. Microsoft had plans of employing many freelance bloggers to promote evangelism, using money. Scoble now runs on Linux and when I mailed him about it, he could only come up with a lame excuse about this choice.
If you seek a popular blog to aggregate, skip Scoble. It is an utter waste of time. Grossly overrated.