I agree with Chuq Von Rospach. Sites shouldn’t be forced to take advertising, even to give that money to a charity.

I don’t take advertising here, well, except if you count my Amazon link and my occassional mentioning of Seagate, which sponsors my video show.

Anyway, there’s a cost to advertising in clutter, in extra bits that the infrastructure needs to push out, and in reduced quality of experiences for users.

And, it’s a smart piece of business on the part of Craig’s List to try to be different. You get audiences that way. There’s other ways to make money from audiences than just putting a few ads on your site.

I’m very loyal to Craig’s List, cause he got me my job at NEC, which led to getting a job at Microsoft.

OK, this is weird. So I was in the Mercury News today and my first girlfriend from back at Prospect High School says she read that, wondered if I was the guy she hung around in High School, Googled me, confirmed that I was the Robert Scoble she remembered, and wrote me.

I haven’t seen her since 1983.

Even better, she’s director of marketing at a tech company.

Thanks to Mike Cassidy and Google. What a weird world we live in.

I interviewed the StumbleUpon team today. I hadn’t used it before today (sorry, I can’t try every cool thing that comes through my Link Blog).

But it rocks. It brings you cool Web sites that other people have rated. The service is very hot (about 1.5 million users already). Whew.

Ahh, lots of bloggers got invited to an all-expenses-paid shindig of some kind up at Microsoft. How do I know that? Cause Evan Williams posted such on his Twitter account.

Rael Dornfest, Mike Arrington, Molly Holtzschlag, are there, among others. Can we get a complete list?

By the way, our BlogHaus at CES will be open to ANY blogger, not just those “blessed” by Microsoft or some other company. You just need to have me put your name on the list so you can get up to our suite. My email is robertscoble@hotmail.com.

For those of you who can’t get an invite to stuff like this (me neither, so don’t worry) maybe you should watch JibJab’s Nuckin’ Futs video. Funny!

Fun little exercise over on CNN/Money. Get a bunch of VCs, ask them what they are looking for (Steve Krausz, who was one of the funders of PodTech, is there asking for a new kind of video matchmaking site), and see if anyone can put together a business plan to get funded. Email addresses of VC’s provided.

Homework project — compare:

Digg/Tech
Slashdot
TechMeme
My Link Blog
TailRank
Reddit
Google/Tech News

With CNET’s News.com, which used to be my favorite tech news site.

Now, read Paul Kedrosky’s post about CNET’s “mounting challenges.”

To me, what’s wrong with CNET is easy to see. There’s a lot more than “mounting challenges” — there’s a mountain of competition that they haven’t reacted to yet.

Wow, just got back, and it gets worse and worse for Loic.

Tom Morris has the best roundup I’ve seen.

Ben Metcalfe, who caused a ruckus at last year’s conference, has the blog comment picture of the year, and suggested that Gnomedex come to London.

Oh, that would be fun!

Me? I’m looking forward to LIFT and Reboot.

Those are two quality European conferences. Reboot is a bit geekier, more developer-focused, and LIFT is more like a Pop!Tech or a TED in terms of trying to get ideas discussed (both are planned by developers, so have a feel and approach that is refreshing).

Wow, I gotta come back to this later, but when I just walked into PodTech’s offices after a day of interviewing and being mostly off of the Net several people came up to me and said “did you hear what happened at Le Web conference?”

I have one more interview to do today, but looks like Loic has a full meltdown of attendee feelings (people are VERY angry, on first look at posts from the conference, because Loic had a couple of politicians who spoke in French, didn’t take questions, and gave a political speech where attendees expected talk of blogging and technology). I have no idea what I’d do if I were in his position. One thing it tells me: don’t give your audience something they didn’t expect.

Netgear makes a lot of the WiFi routers found in homes around the world so it was a great privilege to interview Netgear’s CEO, Patrick Lo.

He’s ultra approachable. Works in a cube surrounded by customer service people. I like that.

Unfortunately I had left my tripod at home by accident, so you get ScobleShow handheld. Hey, who said I had to be professional?

I gotta remember to keep trips to Google down to under two hours. Why? My head starts hurting. It’s like being in an intellectual candy store. Everyone I meet shows me something else cool and gives me another 10 ways to make my blog better (hey, Mike Cassidy, if you think your blog sucks, you should hang out at Google for a while — they’ll show you 50 ways to make your blog better).

Actually, that sounds like an interesting post for Matt Cutts to do someday: 50 ways Google’rs can make your blog better.

My first interview was with Mark Lucovsky (blog here). I apologized to him for not believing that businesses would host their data off site. They do, and are, in increasing numbers. He explained that the press got Hailstorm all wrong. Too bad he didn’t have a blog back then.

Anyway, then he explained what he was working on at Google: APIs APIs APIs APIs APIs.

Oh, sorry, I was channelling Steve Ballmer there for a moment.

Heh. He’s actually working on the AJAX Search API. This is a pretty interesting API that lets you put maps, and search results, on your Web page or blog. He has tons of examples. I’ll get the video up soon.

Then it was onto Shashi Seth. He works on Google CoOp. I had no idea such a thing existed. You probably don’t either.

What’s that? Oh, just a custom version of Google’s search engine. Say you want to put a search box on your blog, but you only want Google to display results from, say, your blog, mine, and Mike Arrington’s blog. Well, CoOp lets you do that.

Anyway, I think I’ll hang out in the lobby of Google’s Building 43 more often. Marissa Mayer, VP at Google, dropped by to say hi. Well, OK, she was passing through and I said hi to her. No, I didn’t ask her about what Google is copying from Yahoo. Didn’t have time. I did ask lots of other employees at Google, though, and while no one would own up to knowing who did the copying they assured me he or she was getting a lot of ribbing right now.

In between the other people I saw in the lobby that I knew (quite a few) was Aaron Swartz, co-founder of NotABug, which makes Reddit. That was recently sold to Conde Nast, so he’s working on a whole bunch of editorial properties for them (Reddit is similar to Digg).

I’m off to interview Stumbleupon…

Ahh, Mike Cassidy wrote about me in the San Jose Mercury News today and begs for help coming up with a new name.

Me? I’m off to Google to interview two of the top geeks there. More on that later.

Note to myself: if you’re gonna point out the copying going on in someone else’s house, you better not be copying anyone’s stuff yourself!

How do I know this? Well, Matt Cutts, of Google, answers back Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo, with a very interesting post about copying.

Valleywag cracks me up.

But I like the editorial comment on this Scott Beale picture better (mouse over the picture to see the comment).

Ahh, the future of tech evangelism is Laura Foy doing her shtick for Microsoft’s On10 YouTube style (she works in the evangelism group, same group I worked in). Yeah, I missed the popularity of this video. But Jeff Sandquist was bragging about it at the wedding on Saturday night so I just had to check it out. I wish I had creative skillz. Then I could be popular on YouTube too!

It’s the small things that will cause your PR teams headaches.

I’m sure someone at Google thought it was OK to copy a page Yahoo did. Details on TechMeme, thanks to getting kicked off by Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny. Maybe even thought the page came from Microsoft. Hint, it didn’t.

It’s at the top of TechMeme. Is on second page of Digg. On first page of TailRank.

But it gets worse. The person doing the copying didn’t even copy the HTML very well. Not good. Especially for a company that prides itself on hiring PhD’s and keeping out idiots. Hey, one got through the hiring process.

But, so far, they are way too slow to react. Matt Cutts, who over the weekend, debunked a bunch of other things, has been silent. The Google Blog is silent too.

Here’s how I would have handled it.

1) Found out who did the page and get them to publicly apologize.
2) Buy the Yahoo team they copied pizza lunch and beer tomorrow. Even better, have a limo show up and take them to a nice steak dinner.
3) If #1 isn’t possible (it might be an outside vendor, I found at Microsoft that often was where stuff like this happened) then have someone like Matt or, even, a VP like Marissa, apologize on behalf of Google.
4) Explain that this isn’t acceptable Google behavior (evil, even) and that steps are being taken to keep it from happening again. Just by saying “that’s evil” will be good enough to tell all Google employees that this kind of thing won’t be tolerated in the future.

It’s the little things that define companies and Google is being defined right in front of us.

For my part? The folks I’ve dealt with at Google are ethical, straight shooters, who wouldn’t dream of copying someone else’s work. This has got to be ripping them up. Tough day ahead for Google PR. It’ll be interesting to see what they do, if anything.

Rex Dixon thinks it’s smart to copy. I can see his point — developers are “inspired” by others all the time. But sheer copying? No. It’s unethical, for one. For two, if you’re going to copy you better add some value. Hint: that means making sure your HTML and images are better than what you’re copying. Not worse.

UPDATED: Google has updated the site in question.

UPDATED 2: Matt Cutts of Google answers back. Note to self: don’t point out someone else is copying if you’re guilty of such transgressions yourself!

Eric Rice pointed me to this site: Wii Have a Problem.

Damn, no one is gonna be able to bring a Wii in my house. At least not until I get insurance on my HDTV.

OK, so it turns out that the CES BlogHaus is in the Bellagio, but up on a floor that security won’t let you get to unless you have a pass.

This will be a fun place to hang out in. Not to mention that it’ll be a good place to get on the ScobleShow.

It’ll be open 24 hours a day. It’s for bloggers. Yes, we’ll check.

Anyway, the details on the BlogHaus are over on PodTech — just leave a comment over there to get added to the list so you’ll be able to get in.

Oh, and I think it was Steve Broback of Blog Business Summit that said we should rename the Bellagio to “Blogio.” Um, no.

Have no idea what “CES” is? Consumer Electronics Show. Happens January 8-11 in Las Vegas. It’s America’s biggest trade show — all about gadgets and stuff.

Translation: it’s the best chance you’ll have to share a beer with someone from Engadget or Gizmodo.

One of the things I offered Seagate with them sponsoring my show is a contest. I designed this with Valerie and Linda and a few others at PodTech.

Got a stack of Seagate hard drives to give away. What’s the contest?

Blog about what you are going to do with a new hard drive. Details and rules and stuff are over here.

So, if I was able to enter, here’s probably what my entry would look like:

Let’s see, I’m doing a lot of video lately. I’ve already filled up two 500GB drives with ScobleShow videos, along with a few of Patrick goofing around, and about 43GBs of photos. One of which has Maryam flipping me off cause I made her walk up a steep hill to take that picture of me next to the tree above (true story, it was our honeymoon).

Anyway, things are getting pretty tight. I have about 1.1GBs of email from the six months I’ve worked at PodTech, including 118MBs of just people wanting me to blog stuff (true story #2, I wish I had more time to get to everyone).

Anyway, let’s just cut the crap. I need more space so I can download Dawn and Drew for my son. ZeFrank and Rocketboom for me.

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course it’s for porn.

Oh, get your mind out of the gutter. Not THAT kind of porn.

“Well, what kind?”

Foodporn.

Please, Seagate, send me a new hard drive so I can load up all that foodporn and I can satiate myself looking at all those luscious videos of sushi. Of course, maybe I’ll cheat and download some of those chocolat videos.

Heheh.

Disclaimer, Seagate sponsors my show and are sponsoring the BlogHaus at CES and I really appreciate that.

I’ve grown fond of Twitter. One thing it does is limit how much you can write on a post. That’s a real pain in the behind. At first. But it makes you communicate a lot in a short space.

Anyway, I’ve done my feeds. I’m 133 emails to go. And I gotta get out invites to the CES BlogHaus. More on that in a second.

It’s gonna be a late night.

I love the new TechMeme River. It’ll be interesting to see how often I use it compared to old-style TechMeme.