This dude has the coolest job in the world. He’s the audio engineer at Austin City Limits and has been for decades.

Anyone have a cooler job? It’s my goal to meet all the people in the world with cool jobs. I figure that’ll keep me busy for at least a few months. :-)

One way you know that they have a cool job? They don’t leave.

Amazing, Twitter has been half down all weekend long. Dave Winer and others have been writing about it. The problems have been covered on TechMeme and other places where one looks for interesting tech news.

But, don’t miss what’s really going on: Twitter is handing FriendFeed a gift. A major one at that.

FriendFeed has seen HUGE growth over the past month (in the month or so that I’ve been on that service more than 7,000 people have friended my account). That’s faster growth than I’ve seen on Twitter.

Why is FriendFeed seeing this growth? Well, for one, it hasn’t gone down since I’ve joined it. It was built from the start to scale, which after I met the team I understood why: two of the founders of FriendFeed started Gmail and Google Maps, so I’m sure they’ve learned a few tricks about making sure services don’t go down from Google.

I’m also noticing another thing: many of my friends are answering Twitter messages in FriendFeed. That demonstrates to me that their behavior has changed in the past month. If Twitter keeps going down and/or having reliability problems it won’t be long before we change ALL of our behavior and just participate on FriendFeed without worrying about Twitter at all.

Of course, today I gave a talk to Stanford’s Sloan program (bunch of MBA students). Only a handful had heard of Twitter. That’s Twitter’s future growth. What if they hear Twitter sucks and that FriendFeed is where they should participate?

Hmmm.

I didn’t know how I would be affected by a trip to Israel. I thought that maybe it might be some famous temple, some cultural experience, or maybe meeting one of Israel’s leaders or technologists that would have touched me.

I wasn’t prepared for what did: a pair of piercing black eyes that belong to “Michael,” a boy a little younger than my own son, Patrick, who is 14. I was asked not to share names or photos by the people who introduced us. See, Michael’s eyes told me they had witnessed things that young eyes shouldn’t witness.

He was one of a group of students from Darfur who were studying at the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv. Here’s an article (PDF, sorry) that talks about the school and its Darfur refugees. A remarkable school where kids from 29 different countries study together.

Michael told me about his studies, introduced me to his classmate sitting next to him. I asked him if he knew how to use a computer. I knew my few moments with Michael were ticking away, our tour guides had other things for us to see and I wanted to be able to hear more about his dreams. His future. He answered that he did, and knew how to use email and the Web.

This young boy’s eyes showed me deep wisdom that will serve him well later in life. They gave me hope for the future. I hope I live long enough to see Michael become a leader of a new Israel: one where Palestinians and Israelis and Arabs live together in peace. He’s seen that future already. In the classroom.

Don’t think technology is important? What will your answer to Michael be when he emails you and asks you to join the peace movement?

Will you leave those penetrating wise eyes wanting?

Not me, I gave him my email address. I hope he writes and tells me about the future. His future. Why?

It gives me hope.

I have a TON I will say about my Israel trip, but in the meantime I just wanted to shout out my fellow travelers who’ve already been doing awesome blogging and stuff about our trip. There are going to be spinouts for weeks from this trip. Heck, just look at the list of tools that alpha geeks use (which was produced on this trip).

I’m too exhausted to do any blogging. Might explain why I’ve been doing so much Twittering. It takes far less effort to write 140 characters at a time than to put together a cogent post.

This headline is only a little in jest. But as I’ve gotten around to various tech companies here in Israel I’ve started noticing a trend: that the further away a tech area is from Silicon Valley the less respect that area will get. The headline is also a bit unfair to TechCrunch/Mike because he’s actually been to Israel and has a couple of writers covering the tech scene here, but if you’re a blogger and let the facts get in the way of a good headline you’ll never go anywhere.

I’ve noticed this when I visited MySpace: they were so excited when I visited because they say that tech bloggers never visit. I was thinking back to my own experiences. Yes, that’s true. Facebook employees regularly meet up with us at parties and dinners and conferences. We run into MySpace employees far less often. These personal connections turn into stories on blogs.

Same when I visited San Antonio. These were companies I never hear about in conversations in the valley. We don’t have personal connections to their employees. Ask yourself, have you ever heard of PerfTech? Kulabyte? Rackspace? Newtech?

Anyway, I’ve been all over to the world. Shanghai. Tokyo. Frankfurt. London. New York. Cork. Dublin. Hamburg. Geneva.

I’ve never seen the entrepreneurial spirit outside of Silicon Valley like I’ve seen here in Tel Aviv. The companies here are doing technology that’s deep, varied, and highly profitable.

Anyway, I’ll write more about this topic over the weekend, because right now we’re about to leave to see Jeruselem and meet with some Venture Capitalists to further understand what’s going on here in Israel.

In the meantime, go to TechCrunch and check out Fring’s new iPhone app. (Fring is headquartered here in Israel, and shows another trend that I’ve noticed here that Israel is WAY ahead of the United States in use of Mobile apps — another thing that’s surprising is how many iPhones you see here, even though there isn’t a single Apple store).

One other thing, Twitter has been where we’ve been having interesting conversations. It was amazing. The other day we were in a van between Haifa and Tel Aviv. Talking with Arrington back in California. Christineleu in China. GiaGia in London. All at the same time.

The advent of Twitter is one thing that’s bringing far away lands into the PR machinery that exists only in Silicon Valley.

I wish I had a month to spend here, so many startups want to get my attention, but I just can’t see them all. But there still is nothing better than meeting face-to-face over a beer to find out interesting stories about people, companies, countries.

For instance, last night several people begged me to write about the proposed Israel Censorship Law. Global Voices Online has already done that, but if it weren’t for being here I wouldn’t have known about the issues that they really care about.

Anyway, off to Jeruselem, stay in touch with us on my Twitter account.

Do you agree or disagree that people, companies, countries can get the respect and/or tech industry PR they deserve if they are far away from Silicon Valley?

Yet another example of Google’s five-year-plan for sticking its foot inside the Enterprise door. What Google is doing here is brilliant.

Google knows that Ray Ozzie is coming later this year with a string of initiatives to keep Microsoft relevant to the new enterprise. They also know that once Microsoft does buy Yahoo Microsoft will use the cuddly Yahoo brand to keep people on its services, too.

So, what is Google doing? Is it trying to build its enterprise strategy itself? No. Look at what it did over the last few weeks: it partnered with Cemaphore to get a Gmail/Outlook connector. It shipped App Engine, which doesn’t seem like it’s aimed at the Enterprise, but watch what developers do with that and you’ll see that’s an important part of the five-year-strategy, and tomorrow it’ll announce a deal with Salesforce (TechCrunch has the details).

Brilliant. They, like the open source movement, are leveraging partnerships to pry open the Enterprise door.

Now we will watch to see how Ray Ozzie defends the door to keep the competition away from its cash cows. I’m visiting Microsoft on June 10-12 to study just that. Oh, and keep June 11th open. Jeff Pulver and I are throwing a breakfast there (Jeff’s breakfasts have become famous around the world — yesterday he had 200 geeks in Tel Aviv — he’s developed a unique way to get people to talk with each other, which is ingenious, more on that later).

Anyway, the Google Five Year Plan is starting to take shape in public. What do you think about its moves?

I’m tracking the new “friend divide.” What is it?

Well, compare your experiences on a number of services when you only have one friend vs., say, 500. Look at Upcoming.org. Have only one friend? It really is empty looking and there’s not much value. Get 500? And you’ll have tons of events reporting to you that you’ll care about (you picked your friends carefully, right?) Plus, you’ll be able to see which events are more popular which may make them more interesting to you.

Look at Flickr? No friends? No photographs that you care about. Add your family and friends? Lots of fun stuff to look at.

Facebook? Same thing. Choose your friends wisely, though. Professional people don’t poke or ask you to join stupid applications. Get lots of college kids and you might just lose your mind.

Dopplr? No friends? You won’t have anyone to meet at the airport or take out for a beer.

Pownce? No friends? You won’t get sent cool music or cool photography.

Twitter? No friends? You will think it’s a lame service? Follow only me and you’ll probably go insane. Follow 500, though, and you’ll probably start to see the value that I see in this service.

The friend divide means that people who have no friends on these services have poor experiences and aren’t getting any interesting information or apps or photos or music, etc. People who have tons of friends have HUGELY different experiences on these services. I’ll demonstrate those differences in a video soon.

But that gets me to another point. This weekend Andrew Baron is selling his Twitter account. That’s a PR ploy. But what’s interesting is that people assume there’s value in getting his followers (probably because they assume there’s some value in spamming those followers with marketing messages). That’s funny since it’s so easy to unfollow people.

But there +is+ value in having a great group of people you’re following. Follow @craignewmark and you’ll see what Craig is seeing or thinking (he’s the founder of Craigs’ List). Follow @pierre and you’ll see what he’s thinking (he’s the founder of eBay). Follow HRBlock and you’ll see what the team at H&R Block is thinking about taxes and such. Follow @newmediajim and you’ll see what Jim Long, who is a camera guy in the press pool at the White House, is thinking about.

Now, do you start to get it? If you define yourself by who is following you you’ll always feel inadequate. After all, you can’t control your followers and any idiot can follow people. But, define yourself by who you are following and you can really build something of high value.

People still aren’t getting this. They didn’t get how I was using Twitter and still don’t. I follow the world’s best early adopters, business executives, and entrepreneurs. I really don’t care if I have a single follower. If I defined myself by my followers I’d always feel inadequate. If I define myself by the people who I follow, well, I follow the smartest, richest, coolest, funniest people in the world. That makes me smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier.

So, how do you define your experience online?

When I got into the Kinnernet conference in Israel I found out that we were all going to have roommates so that everyone could fit into the lake-side resort here. I was a little disappointed, after all I had just spent the last few trips rooming with Rocky Barbanica and I was looking forward to having a room all to myself.

But when I opened the door and found Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List, sitting there on his computer I knew that this would be an interesting weekend. Craig’s List is the top classified ad site on the Internet and is how I got my job at NEC.

And interesting it has remained. I’m at the Kinnernet camp which is a small, exclusive, elitist, by invitation only, affair that’s just been a thrill a minute (it’s done by Yossi Vardi, the investor who’s kids started ICQ back in 1996). How did I get invited? Yossi proudly shows me around and says “this is the guy who had the first ICQ Web site.”

At Kinnernet there are robots running around, people flying weird contraptions (one of the world’s top remote control helicopter pilots is here), weird devices of all kinds, and TONS of geeks and entrepreneurs.

But back to Craig. He’s got such a great sense of humor. His business card reads “customer service representative.”

I’ve been giving him heck for not being on Twitter. He joined this morning and said “now everyone can see how boring I am.”

Valleywag, last night, asked me to ask him if he’s gotten rich yet. He answered “if I really had a lot of money would I be rooming with Scoble?”

Hey!

Anyway, some of our fun here at Kinnernet is up on my Qik account. The wifi here is very shaky.

For more info on Kinnernet, there are quite a few people blogging and stuff. Check out Google’s Blog Search for Kinnernet.

Louis Gray, who is now my favorite blogger who covers what’s happening in the social media space, writes a blog post about how bloggers are getting worried about the fracturing of their comments. It is currently on the top of TechMeme, and since today’s Saturday, that must mean it’s the bitchmeme of the week.

Anyway, I am seeing this trend big time. Over on FriendFeed I’m seeing better comments than I see on most blogs (and more quantity too).

The era when bloggers could control where the discussion of their stuff took place is totally over.

This is a trend that the best bloggers should embrace. Me? I follow wherever the conversation takes me.

As someone else wrote: steal my content please.

As a counterpoint, Tony Hung tells us all to NOT steal his content. Me? I’ve found that by being open with my content a lot of good has come back to me, so I’m with Louis on this one.

Bloggers, pick your sides! Who you with? Louis? Or Tony?

Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10.

What’s the difference? I’ve been on lots of airplanes in the past month. Why is that important? Because in airplanes there’s no Internet. Nothing to distract you. I find I can answer about 10x more email in a plane than I can on the ground when the Internet is there to distract me.

That taught me an important lesson.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.

Turn off the distractions.

Another datapoint? When I talked with Linda Stone a couple months ago (she came up with the term “continuous partial attention” which describes the kind of world we live in when we have Twitter bringing a new post to us every two seconds).

I told her I had one goal in my life, other than to be a good father and a better husband: to have an interesting conversation every day.

She said that was “attention management” at its highest form she’d heard it so far.

What are your goals? Is it to have more followers on Twitter? Or is it to get something done today?

Why can’t we get into the productive state of mind that being trapped in an airplane for 10 hours without the Internet causes?

I just sent 200 emails that I answered over the Atlantic. What a flow state I was in.

Something about being bored causes us to be more productive. Luckily I have lots more trips coming up soon, so I’ll keep up with my email.

More from Israel soon (I’m sitting in Heathrow right now waiting for my flight — of course I’m not being productive because the Internet is back on again. Damn distractions! :-) Heheh).

It might also have to do with the fact that I hate doing email, so avoid it until there’s nothing else to do. Either way, I’m productive. If you count answering email as being productive.