See, if you pay PR people millions and millions they’ll get you on lists like the Forbes Web Celeb 25.

I’m just joking about paying PR people to get me on lists like this. I don’t have money to pay PR people. Seriously there are a lot of people who are far more deserving of Web fame than me.

Like who?

Well, any list of Web celebs that doesn’t have Joe Hewitt on it isn’t a good one in my book. He wrote the iPhone app for Facebook.

The inventor of the Web isn’t on this list. Where’s Joel Spolsky? He has more readers than I do. Tim O’Reilly isn’t on this list. Neither is Mark Cuban (who just became a Facebook whale with 5,000 friends). Where’s the two guys who started Google? Or, heck, Ev Williams who funded Twitter? Loic Le Meur? He has a Web conference with 2,000 attendees and a video site that’s seeing 1,000 new videos a day. How about the YouTube team? Or the guy who did “Will it Blend?” Or Bre Petis of Make Magazine? Or Hugh Macleod? And Fake Steve Jobs? That’s fine, but where’s Uncov? They are just as biting as FSJ or Valleywag but they actually code so their insults have more teeth. Jay Smooth? I love that dude. Doc Searls? The three co-founders of BlogHer? Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, founders of Global Voices Online? Leo Laporte? (his radio shows and This Week in Tech are listened to by hundreds of thousands. John Dvorak?

OK, it’s almost 3 a.m. and I’m just getting started. There’s a LOT more people who deserve to be on such a list than me and that’s not just fake humility either.

I am honored, though. I just wish these lists were more inclusive. Who deserves to be on this list in your view?

I’ll be seeing John Battelle later this afternoon and will try to get him on video about how well his predictions for 2007 went (for the past few years I’ve enjoyed his predictions for the next year more than any other blogger/journalist).

Here, let’s do a little scorecard for John based on how well his predictions did this year.

1. Right. Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion and bought a sliver of Facebook. Negative points for trying to predict that AOL would go public.

2. Wrong. I don’t remember anyone saying that Web 2.0 bubble has burst, just that there is one.

3. Right. YouTube now has its videos on Google’s main search engine. Look for “Martin Luther King” for instance and you see his “I have a dream” speech.

4. Right. Google’s video ads have just started getting going and are far from a home run.

5. Right. Yahoo did not regain its luster, but did replace the CEO.

6. Wrong. eBay hasn’t made major changes to its executive leadership.

7. Right. Amazon has continued kicking butt in the web service space. Negative points for saying that the market will punish it. If anything the market has been supportive.

8. Mostly wrong. Wallstrip was acquired. Several others are on the block. But haven’t seen major content moves unless I’m missing something. I think John should extend this prediction to 2008 because I know several media companies are getting ready to acquire content plays.

9. Neutral. I’m seeing a LOT more traffic moving to RSS, but that’s a trend that hasn’t hit advertising in a big way yet. New metrics are definitely coming out all the time, though, to help advertisers track usage on AJAX, video, and RSS-centric sites.

10. Right. My blog definitely needs a redesign now that we have Twitter, Facebook, streaming video, etc.

11. Right. Facebook screwed up the privacy/trust issue.

12. Right. Google has gotten heck in the mainstream media.

13. Right. Mobile finally arrived in the US market with the iPhone.

Damn, mostly right. It’ll be an interesting morning.

Heheh, here’s proof that I’m insecure. At least it’s true if you look at a Guardian article that says that research is showing that people with more than 800 Facebook friends are seen as insecure. I guess having 4,999 friends makes one really, really insecure! Shhhh, don’t tell the Guardian that I have 1,148 friends waiting to get in (Facebook doesn’t let you have more than 4,999 friends).

OK, Google has added a bunch of new features to its RSS Reader over the past week. What are the big ones?

1. There’s now a social network. Along the left side of Google Reader, I now see an item that says “Friends’ shared items.”
2. There’s now a profile that you can share with your readers. You’ll see that profile when you click on “Your shared items.”

These features are largely unfinished and unpolished. Here’s my feedback for the team:

1. Why isn’t my profile shared on my link blog? (NEVERMIND: that feature just got turned on!)
2. The “Friends’ shared items” needs to be able to display the profile when you mouse over names. The list that’s presented is nearly useless. Aside: I’m still adding friends at scobleizer@gmail.com
3. When you click “Manage friends” it sure would be nice to see what kinds of things each person has already shared. We can’t. All we can see is if they’ve shared anything or not. That’s not very helpful. If someone shares porn, I don’t want to friend them and pollute my feeds.
4. We really need to be able to add our own tags on top of each friend.
5. I’m still getting duplication in the Friends’ shared items feed.
6. Things seem slow, that’s not what I’m used to with Google stuff. Did you test the scalability here? I bet none of the developers on the team have hundreds of friends cause the UI falls apart and so does the performance of the friends page.
7. A LOT more people are sharing feeds than I expected to, which is cool, but means more features/filtering needed.
8. I don’t think it’s a privacy problem because it’s pretty clear to me that when you share something it goes into public view, but some of my friends REALLY disagree. So, that tells me you have, at minimum, a perception/expectation problem and probably have some rethinking to do as you add new features that take advantage of the public shared items capabilities.
9. I want to be able to hide items from people right from the Friends’ shared items view.
10. There’s not a payoff for people yet to enter their profile information: out of hundreds of Google Reader friends only a handful had filled in much information (UPDATE: Now that profiles show up on the shared items page, the payoff is increasing). If this is how Google is going to take on Facebook it’s a failure so far.
11. All these new features make me wish I had some way to lay things out for my readers in a hierarchy. Sort of like TechMeme does.
12. The flow is incredible from just the friends I’ve already added (there were 880 items waiting for me tonight). It sure would be nice to see a “here’s the 40 most popular items from your friends” page.
13. It would be nice for me to have two shared items pages that you could see: 1. the one I already do. 2. the one my friends do (they are darn good at picking news — better, even, than TechMeme or Digg!)
14. While I’m at it, I’d love to add a comment onto each item so I could tell you why I thought it was important.

Google does deserve some kudos, though, because it was very easy to add links to its competitors. I added a link to Twitter, Facebook, and a variety of other social networking services — I wish I could do the same from Facebook.

December 15, 2000. That’s when I started blogging. In seven years a lot has happened. The first two years of my blog have disappeared. They might be on a hard drive somewhere, I’m still trying to track them down. Dave Winer first linked to me on December 29th (sent me about 3,000 people, if I remember my stats right).

The term “weblog” is 10 years old on Monday. So lots of blogging birthdays. Jorn Barger, the guy who came up with the name, has some tips for new bloggers to celebrate. It’s good advice and advice I try to listen to. It’s amazing that I was three years behind Jorn but that when I started there was still only a very small community of bloggers (less than 200 that I could find — I did some research since Dori Smith asked me to do a session on blogging at the Internet conference I was helping Dan Shafer plan).

The Internet Archive has some of my posts backed up, but the earliest one they have is from February 2001 and the one they have from 9/11 is totally gone.

When I started I had absolutely no idea I’d have worked at two of the world’s biggest technology companies, at least in part because of my blog (NEC and Microsoft) and that I’d have so many fantastic experiences.

Truth is that this form of communication is still in its infancy. Imagine talking about newspapers just 10 years after they were developed and thinking “this is it, no more to do.” Yeah, right.

2008 is going to bring us live streaming video from our cell phones. What’s beyond that? Who knows, but I’m along for the ride!

Thanks to everyone who has sent me a link, called me an idiot, put up with my questions and laugh, read my posts without saying anything, or just joined me someplace for coffee. There are way too many people who’ve added something to my life to list. Dave Winer certainly is at the head of that list, so I’m glad we got to spend the afternoon together today.

In the past seven years I’ve survived:

1. The bubble bursting.
2. A car wreck.
3. A terrorist attack.
4. A divorce.
5. My grandma dying.
6. My mom dying.
7. A new marriage.
8. Five moves.
9. Five jobs (soon to be six).
10. Three URLS (1 http://scobleizer.manilasites.com 2. http://scoble.weblogs.com 3. http://robertscobleizer.com ).
11. I don’t know how many social networks I’ve been on (Twitter, Upcoming, Seesmic, Kyte, Flickr, Orkut, MySpace, Google Reader, Facebook, Yelp, Pownce, Jaiku are some of the ones I’m on currently).
12. Successfully getting Patrick into teenage years.
13. Birth of a new son, Milan.
14. Writing a book about corporate blogging with Shel Israel, “Naked Conversations.”
15. A new bubble?

Whew, and that doesn’t include the hundreds of interviews I’ve done (about 500 while at Microsoft and about 300 since then) or all the Google Reader shared items (about 8,000 — UPDATE: I just passed 8,000) or the posts I’ve done (I have no clue).

One regret? I’ve never gone back and read old items I’ve posted other then the few I’ve linked to here. I really should look back a bit more and see what life was like.

Anyway, I hope I’m here with you all seven years from now celebrating Milan’s seventh birthday. I wonder what’s going to happen in the next seven years?

Let’s take that ride together, shall we?

The Virtual Earth team wants our feedback.

Wonderful. Kudos to any company that wants its customers’ feedback and offers a participatory approach. So, here’s my feedback…

Microsoft added a LOT of whizbang features to its maps.live.com maps (3D, lots of photos, and such) but they didn’t focus on the basics.

First off, you need a redesign. Google is kicking your ass on simplicity. Microsoft’s UIs always seem to get more clutter. Your team should hire Ev Williams to come and give his talk that he just gave at LeWeb3. Get rid of stuff, don’t add it.

2. Mobile. Make it killer and do whatever it takes to get it on the iPhone.

3. Show examples of how to do great searches. Google does, you don’t (at least not before you get into a search box). Google is easier to use because of it.

4. Make it work for what people use maps for. Today I picked up Patrick at his school. I forgot how to get there. Patrick said “just search Google Maps for Petaluma Jr. High.” When I saw this note I tried the same on Microsoft’s system. Hint: Google worked, Microsoft didn’t.

5. Speed. Google is always faster everytime I try it. That doesn’t give me confidence that Microsoft is working on the right things.

6. When I search for “Mavericks, Half Moon Bay, CA” Google finds me a result, Microsoft doesn’t.

7. Split all the different views into different URLs. Have a page where I can select between them. If I wasn’t a former MSFTie I’d have no clue what the difference between “Aerial” and “Bird’s Eye View” is.

8. I still have no clue what “collections” are. “Saved Locations” explains what they are much better.

9. Don’t be pedantic. When I asked it to give me directions to PodTech’s offices it tried to correct my zip code from 94304 to 94304-1216. Google wasn’t annoying like that.

10. Microsoft’s maps look cooler (they show mountain terrain, etc) but are harder to read, particularly on laptop screens in bright sunlight. I find I actually switch to Google for this reason. Most of the time I really don’t need terrain, or pretty pictures, but just want a simplistic, easy to see in bright sunlight, map.

11. DO continue to kick Microsoft’s behind with Traffic data (I’m sure there’s other data you could overlay on the map the way you do with accident data, right?)

12. Redesign your directions results. Google got nine items in the same space that you only got six. I often look up maps on my laptop and that DOES make a difference!

13. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. My Location. That’s the best feature on ANY software I’ve used this year. I was showing it to Patrick today and it made him go “wow.” Not available on iPhone, but only on Google’s Mobile Maps version. This was a MAGICAL feature over in Europe!

14. You don’t understand the magic of the word “link.” I can always figure out Google Maps and how to embed it into my blog. It’s tough for me to figure out how to link to a Microsoft Map. Yeah, I’m an idiot so you might write that off as idiotic behavior but, remember, I worked the Microsoft customer support lines so I know there are other idiots out there like me. Some of them even blog. Every blog brings you traffic, even if the only reader that blog has is mom and dad. Call it a f***ing permalink and call it a day, will you please?

15. I’m surprised no one has used their photo trucks to put little pictures next to driving directions. Instead on both maps I get “turn right onto SR-92.” Why don’t you put a little picture of what the sign looks like? I’d love it if you said “you’ll see a sign that looks like this right before you need to turn right.”

16. Amazing that NEITHER Google or Microsoft have a link that says “using GPS.” I’d love to have a page that explains all about how GPS works, which models are the coolest to use with these mapping systems, and what I need to get and how I need to hook it up. This could even be a profit center. If Microsoft linked over to Amazon’s store they’d get a kickback for each GPS sold.

17. Google Maps remember my default location. Microsoft Maps don’t seem to remember anything.

18. Google has more viewing area horizontally. For some reason my eye likes that.

Well, that’s enough. I’m not sure why I like Google Maps more, but they keep being my default and nothing I saw on this little jaunt tonight made me question that decision. I have never needed 3D imagery to get around, preferring the simple approach (although those features are impressive).

What do you think? What would you work on if you were on the Microsoft Mapping team? I haven’t even attempted to look up anything international, either. But Google was very accurate in Paris and London and told me instantly where I was thanks to its My Location feature. That really is the killer feature for me and it’s one that now gets me to use my Nokia N95 to look at maps instead of my iPhone (the iPhone is better for viewing and navigating around maps, though, but that one feature has proven much more important to me than anything else in the mapping experience).

Anyway, good luck!

Oh, and has anyone built a map mashup yet for Facebook? I’d love to see where all my friends are located around the world.

Hmmm, is this the first Twitter business card? The first Kyte business card? The first Seesmic business card? Heheh.

Thanks to Hugh Macleod, my favorite London artist.

What does the other side say? “You’ve been Microscobleized.” All in honor of creating my global microbrand.

Oh, and that’s Ben Metcalfe’s face.

Update: Frans says he’s had Twitter on his business card since February.

On the way home from Paris Jeff Clavier was on our plane. Don’t know who he is? Well, he’s made some killer investments this year as an early stage venture capitalist. The best? He told me Social Media.com. An application network for advertisers on social media sites like Facebook. He told me how much it’s bringing in per day, but I’m not sure he wanted that number public. Let’s just say that in a week it brings in a lot more than I make in a year.

Earlier this week, during Marc Canter’s panel at LeWeb, I asked whether we could get a first step on all the social networks toward true social graph portability (which probably won’t happen because it’s too complex to do, because there are too many privacy rules, and because companies aren’t likely to give up their lockin anytime soon — imagine being able to drag all your information along with all of that of your friends from Facebook to MySpace and you’ll seee just how hard portability is going to prove to be). Translation: I agree with James Snell, who just made that point.

But here’s a challenge for social networks: how about you all add links to other social networks. So, when I look up Dave Winer on Twitter, for instance, I could see that he’s also on Flickr and Facebook.

For instance, I’m on Upcoming.org. If you visit me there you won’t have a clue that I’m also on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Yelp and a variety of other networks.

Plaxo and Pownce are two that are already letting me add links to other networks I’m on. I’m wondering if the industry could come up with some auto discovery protocols and/or ways to manually link things up?

Doing just this small step would greatly help us get down the road to some sort of federated system where I don’t need to fill out my information for each of my networks I’m on. It really is a pain in the behind to keep them all up to date.

Please? Pretty please?

Yesterday, while I was on a panel discussion at LeWeb3 talking about the future of video something happened that discussed my future. I was driving the computer during the panel discussion, demonstrating bleeding edge video technologies like Seesmic and Kyte on stage when someone wrote in my Kyte.tv channel’s chat room that I should check out TechCrunch. So, in front of everyone I pulled up the post. You’ve probably read it by now. It said simply: Scoble to Leave PodTech, Heading for Fast Company.

I’m sorry I didn’t break the news here on my blog, but breaking it in front of thousands of people at a major industry conference is OK too (Arrington, who wrote the post, was in the audience) because people got to see my real, unfiltered, reaction.

UPDATE: I didn’t know that Arrington was going to post about it then. Dave Winer was sitting next to him in the audience and gives his point of view.

I told everyone that it was true that I had decided to leave PodTech, but that Fast Company hasn’t been signed yet and that I’m still considering two options, one of which is Fast Company. My last day there will be January 14th. I am working on a number of PodTech initiatives, including the CES BlogHaus as well as a Blogger Bus Tour to CES from San Francisco to Las Vegas which is sponsored by Microsoft (more on the bus, as well as how you can get a seat, next week when I get back into the office).

So, what will happen on January 15th? I told the audience at LeWeb that things haven’t been wrapped up yet. I have two options I’m considering on the table and will announce what I’m doing on January 15th.

How did it leak? Well, I needed advice between these two options and so I ask my friends to give me advice (actually, Rocky and I have been thinking a lot about this and have turned down a half dozen other options). I talk too much, which is my downfall, but also I got some world-class advice from people all over the industry.

Why didn’t I blog about it? Because I had family and other committments between the panel and now (it’s currently 2:24 a.m. and we’re packing to come home now).

Why not be transparent on the blog? Wasn’t that the lesson of Naked Conversations (our book that studied how 188 businesses used blogging)?

If you read Naked Conversations you’d know that we don’t recommend putting everything about your life on your blog. We even have a whole chapter about people who’ve gotten fired because they put inappropriate things on their blogs.

Certainly discussing career moves on a blog is inappropriate if you don’t have a clue what moves you’ll make (staying at PodTech was always on the table as one of the options until a week ago, for instance, when Rocky and I made some decisions about what would be best for our careers going forward).

Why not stay at PodTech? PodTech went through a lot of managerial chaos earlier this year and I was trying to help PodTech get to profitability and help it get some focus, business wise. You’ve seen some of those moves already as PodTech has moved away from an editorial focus and toward an corporate media development one, which is where much of PodTech’s revenues (which are in the millions per year now) are coming from. That’s a decision I helped PodTech make and I think they are good ones and will help it avoid the TechCrunch Dead Pool. Companies need a lot of help creating media, so PodTech has a pretty good future opportunity ahead of it, which is why its investors continue to support it.

When did I make this decision? In the past week. I know that back in October I said I wasn’t going to leave PodTech, but a lot has changed in that two-month period. PodTech’s new management team has been working together a lot better, and the direction it’s been going is different than it was back in October.

Now that PodTech is getting some focus I found that my show needed a new home in order for it to get to the next level, too.

Before I go on, I want to thank Seagate for sponsoring my show, which enabled me to interview more than 300 people over the past year or so. Looking back at that year it’s amazing how many people have come in front of my lens.

I’m a geek, a user advocate, and enjoy doing my show more than anything else in the world other than hanging out with Milan, Patrick, and Maryam. This week I got to do all three together in Paris thanks to Loic Le Meur, and I’ll always be in his debt for that. I’ll also, too, always be in debt to PodTech and John Furrier for hiring me and encouraging me to do a daily video show and giving me the resources to do that.

I’m also seeing significant changes to how you all interact with each other. Over the past year we’ve seen Twitter, Facebook, Kyte, Seesmic, Ustream, Justin.tv, Pownce, Jaiku, and quite a few other technologies get popular.

This interview with Mogulus’ CEO and Chris Pirillo’s pioneering efforts with his own live TV channel played a key role in getting me to see that there’s a new kind of TV channel possible — one that’s participatory instead of one-way — and one that would be very low cost and potentially have high revenue possibilities compared to the cost.

Remember, you don’t need a large audience to make a lot of money in this industry. I used to help edit a computer magazine, Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal (which later became Visual Studio Magazine) and that only had 100,000 subscribers, but millions in revenues. I also love the Demo series of conferences. There the audience (usually more than 1,000 people) pays more than $1,000 each to attend and everyone on stage pays $18,000 to present to that audience.

Another thing that opened my eyes? The Google Open Social press conference where I had the only video, thanks to Kyte.tv and my cell phone (they had asked for me to leave my professional camera in the car — funny that’s a story I’ve heard several times, including on the panel discussion yesterday where Jeff Pulver showed off video he shot on a small pocket camera of the recent Led Zepplin concert. He told the audience that Led Zepplin wants to buy his photos and videos because they were better than the professional ones).

At the Google Open Social press conference, instead of doing “professional journalism” and cranking out an article like other bloggers and journalists in the room I opened up Twitter and started telling people what I was hearing. Then I listened to them and asked questions during the press conference that they wanted answered. It changed how press conferences should be done in my eyes forever. Add streaming video, like AMD used the other day in another press conference, and things would be dramatically different.

Which gets me back to the headline I used here: it’s your business.

I’m watching how Loic Le Meur is building Seesmic by including the community into every decision he makes. His software doesn’t have the most features out there (Kyte.tv beats it by a mile, particularly on the mobile phone side of things, which is why I love Kyte so much) but Le Meur is building up a ton of love in the community for his approach.

The participants are in control there. It is your business.

I’m tired of getting used by companies who just use and use and use without giving me anything in return. I remember three years ago when I first heard the words “user generated media.” That term still pisses me off. I’m not a user, I’m a participant. I actually love it when Christopher Coulter calls it “loser generated media.”

So, whatever I do next will place that philosophy at the center. It is your business.

One other thing: I really have hated not being open and transparent the past year. Whatever I do next will have to put up with me talking with my friends, telling you openly what’s going on in the business and in my life, and we’ll build something fun together where we’re all equal participants. Our Photowalking series gets damn close to what I’m thinking of. It’s not lost on me that our videos in the photowalking series has more comments per video than the average ScobleShow videos do and those generally have more comments than other PodTech videos do. That’s media made by participation, not by some committee or some gatekeeper or some “A list blogger” somewhere. But using the newest technologies we can even bring participation in a photowalk to a whole new level. Justin.tv demonstrated that to me.

How will we make revenues? Well, there’s a variety of companies that are leading the way in participatory philosophies: You know, those that design products with their customers, or treat their customers as participants the way that Loic does with Seesmic. HP, for instance, is bringing its customers into help design its products. I saw a laptop at HP that was partially designed by a customer. A participant. HP is far from alone in leading that charge as well.

So, anyway, thanks for all the nice notes and let’s talk again about this on January 15th after I make my final decision and start my show down a new path.

Oh, and in late January I’ll be going to the World Economic Forum, where we’ll kick things off.