DISCLAIMER: Please be patient, during launch we’ll probably have some technical difficulties — our engineers have been up all night optimizing databases and getting things turned on. If you’re not having a good experience, please check back later in the day.

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The first shows have just launched on FastCompany.tv:

1. FastCompany Live.
2. ScobleizerTV.

The first is a show done totally on cell phones. If you’ve been watching my Qik channel, you’ve been getting a preview.

The second is a new version of my show. This time done with high-end microphones and much better camera equipment. Oh, and a camera operator (that’d be my producer, Rocky Barbanica) instead of me trying to do everything.

CenterNetworks was the first site to write about our new network. Mashable followed quickly afterward.

The first four shows are ones we’re pretty proud of:

0. A welcome video that we filmed yesterday.
1. The Innovator. Interview with John Kao who taught business at Harvard University for 14 years and now consults with companies about how to get more innovative. BusinessWeek named his book one of the most important business books of 2007, too.
2. Getting Friendly with MySpace’s CEO. Chris DeWolfe invites us into his office to talk about MySpace and how it’ll keep Facebook from taking over its world.
3. First Look at Microsoft’s Stunning WorldWide Telescope. This is the thing that made me tear up when I saw it because it’s the most impressive thing I’ve seen Microsoft do in years. We visit Curtis Wong’s office to get an in-depth look.
4. Meeting with Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist. Many of you know about Amazon’s Web Services, like S3 or EC2, but I wanted to introduce them to the broader Fast Company audience, so we visited Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle and talked with Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist, about the impact that they’ve had on business.

Some things that haven’t yet shipped that will soon:

1. Shel Israel’s program, Global Neighborhoods. We’re still working on that and will start that in a couple of weeks. He’s been to tons of companies including General Motors, Ford, Intel, and Seesmic and we’re working to build an interesting program for you that’ll focus on social media’s impact on culture and business.
2. My blog’s redesign. We’re working on that, but it might take a month more to get it complete and make sure it really works well before turning it on.
3. High-resolution videos. I want higher-resolution videos to be available (we’re shooting and editing most of our stuff in 720p HD, but only delivering smaller sizes right now — that’ll change thanks to our use of Twistage, which is a new company in San Francisco that’s providing the video backend and player technology we’re using).
4. RSS Feeds that work with iTunes. That’s the first thing to fix after the developers get some sleep (they were up most of Sunday night working on this).
4. A bunch of other stuff. I have a long list of things to add to the site. Schedules for our live videos and other stuff. Ways for you to upload your own videos to the site. And tons more.

I also wanted to thank our sponsor, Seagate. We’re not only using their hard drives to edit and store our videos on (and they are massive files) but they’ve put financial muscle behind the show so that we can not only pay our bills, but travel around the world — in April I’ll be visiting Amsterdam and Israel.

Some Q&As?

QUESTION: How is this different from the shows that you’ve done at Microsoft and PodTech?

ANSWER: Professional microphones. Heheh. Seriously, we just got some really nice new equipment. No more tapes! And we have Rocky doing two-camera shoots now. Look for the production values to continue going up (we had to use Rocky’s older equipment for some of the first shows).

We’ll also broaden the content. We’re working with the editors of Fast Company magazine to get content that’s not just about the tech industry. John Kao’s interview is a good example of the kinds of things we’d like to do in the future.

QUESTION: Where’s the tour of Microsoft Research that you were bragging about?

ANSWER: Coming in the next two weeks. We have a ton of stuff and we’ll run a new video every day or so.

QUESTION: What happened to Shel Israel’s show, why isn’t it up now?

ANSWER: We just ran out of time and wanted to make sure that we could deliver a great show. That’ll start soon.

QUESTION: Why do the RSS feeds suck?

ANSWER: They will be fixed soon so that they work on iPhones and have full-text.

QUESTION: Why does your blog still say you work for PodTech?

ANSWER: Because I was lazy. Actually, the truth is I forgot about it, and I don’t have control of my sidebar and I was hoping that the redesign of my blog would be ready. We’ll get that fixed soon.

QUESTION: Where’s the video downloads so I can put these things on my iPhone?

ANSWER: Those are coming soon, sorry for not having them ready yet.

QUESTION: Why watch this show instead of, say, Rocketboom, Geek Brief.TV, or Diggnation (three of my favorite online video shows)?

ANSWER: You should watch all of us! Seriously, we’ll focus on innovative entrepreneurs, business ideas, new businesses. How will we be different from CNBC? Depth. Most of the time when you see a company on TV the entrepreneurs can’t really give you a full-blown demo because they only get a few minutes. On the Internet we don’t have such pressures to make things short and exciting (a producer at CNBC, when I was on that during the Consumer Electronics Show, told me “we don’t care about gadgets.” On FastCompany.TV? We care).

QUESTION: Who do you most want to interview?

ANSWER: Steve Jobs, because then I’d be a hero to my 14-year-old son who loves Apple stuff.

But seriously, I like meeting people building new things that we didn’t expect. I hope to interview Google’s Android team soon, to get a look at what they are trying to do, for instance.

QUESTION: Will you be adding more shows?

ANSWER: Yes, but slowly. For a few reasons. First, we don’t have venture capital funding us, so we’ve got to make sure we can support new investment. Second, I want to make the quality of everything on the network higher than anything out there before we start expanding. But, yes, we want to start developing new shows, so please let us know if you have something in mind.

And please do let me know what you think, good or bad.

I love the new BlogTalkRadio. Why? I just call a phone number, +1-646-200-0000, (you can call it too). I record a conversation with my cell phone, and then it builds an RSS feed that points to MP3’s of my conversation. What’s the URL? It is my cell phone’s phone number. No need to sign up. No need to give personal details, or even agree to anything.

This way I can make a podcast whenever I want. Utterz does something similar, but you gotta setup Utterz before you make your phone call. I like frictionless publishing and no signup before you start makes a lot of sense to me.

This came out of an idea that Dave Winer and I had, great way to build an RSS feed.

Here’s some things I recorded the other night.

Shannon Clark is an entrepreneur and a geek and all that and he wrote an interesting blog post explaining what kinds of things he’d like to see added to the OpenSocial API.

In our five-minute audio conversation, we talk about that blog post and what else we’d like to see in OpenSocial and Facebook and what kind of standards we’d like to see surrounding our privacy, too.

Sanford Dickert is a blogger and entrepreneur who lives in New York. In our 1:42 minute conversation he tells me about Power.com, a service that adds a layer on top of other social networks, he says that this service is awesome.

Thanks to BlogTalkRadio for making this happen.

Photo credit: Sanford Dickert took the photos of me and Shannon Clark.

Last week when I was talking with Linda Stone I told her that I tried to live a “FooCamp Life.”

What’s FOOCamp? That’s Tim O’Reilly’s annual campout where he invites about 300 “Friends Of O’Reilly” to O’Reilly’s headquarters in Sebastapol, CA, for a campout. I was invited for the first two years, then haven’t been invited ever since.

Not getting invited back was the greatest gift that Tim O’Reilly could have given to me. Why? Because he had shown me a way to live, then by pulling it away he forced me to do it on my own. Interesting too, that the same effect caused the creation of BarCamp.

How did FOOCamp create that need? I remember one night at the first FOOCamp when I arrived with my son, Patrick, and we were hungry. There were a few people setting up tents and stuff and they pointed us to the kitchen. When we got there it was empty, but found a box of apples (the eating kind, not the computing kind) and started munching away. Soon an executive from AT&T walked in. Then Yossi Vardi did (his kids started ICQ). Then Linda Stone walked in (she gave me some heck for working for Microsoft which struck me as odd at the time since she was a former executive at both Apple and Microsoft). Then the two guys who started Google walked in. Then Tim O’Reilly himself walked in. That was the beginning of my FOOCamp experience and it only got better from there.

So, when Tim stopped inviting me I told myself I’d have the ultimate revenge: I’d live a FOOCamp Life and have an interesting conversation every day, just like the one I had at FOOCamp that Friday evening at about midnight with my son and a bunch of interesting technologists.

When I told Linda this story she was taken aback. She’s been tracking how people manage attention and she said that my “do an interview every day” was attention management done right. It does keep my life on track and keeps me from being distracted by Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, and all the other stuff. It’s my #2 priority after hanging out with Milan, Patrick, and Maryam. All else, including important emails, gets dropped on the ground.

Anyway, the FOOCamp Life was in high gear yesterday with an interview by NHK’s brightest in the morning, a meeting with Brad Mays, who does PR for AT&T, then onto an interesting conversation with Andrew Feinberg and Alex Tcherkassky of www.capitolvalley.net, a blog that tracks the intersection of politics and technology. More on that conversation in the next post.

Then onto a party where there were tons of interesting people from across the tech industry.

Today I’m going to a film screening at Stanford. More on that when I get permission to talk about the movie.

So, who else is living a FOOCamp Life? How are you managing attention?

Anyway, that gets to the point of this post: attention thieves.

What gets your attention off of your life goals? Or, in my case, keeping me from living a FOOCamp Life? For me, this post was conceived because I started up MSN Messenger and instantly got distracted by several conversations with my friends.

So, what is distracting you from your goals?

Twitter? Facebook? Email? An RSS Reader? World of Warcraft? Flickr? Phone calls? TV?

How do you manage attention? Er, how do you manage your attention thieves?

Thank you to Tim Bray for reminding us of the birthday of XML (he was one of the people involved in its birth) and I’m very grateful to have gotten to know him and Jean Paoli. XML, via RSS, has totally changed my life and I appreciate its invention very much!

Yesterday I was over talking with the team behind Retrevo, the consumer electronics search engine.

We all agreed that Apple TV sucks. More on that in a minute.

But we all notice a trend: hooking MacMinis up to your HTDV. I think it’s a revolution. Revolutions always start small and among the weirdos.

Dave Winer had been on me for a while to get rid of my AppleTV and get a MacMini. As with other revolutions that Dave has started it took me about 1.5 years to get what he was saying and see the brilliance in it. Seriously, he showed me RSS for 1.5 years before I really started using it.

So, a few weeks ago I bought a MacMini, partly to get Dave off of my back and partly to help him test his new software, releasing today.

Now I’m pissed that it took me so long and I’m pissed at the industry that it just doesn’t get what’s coming and they keep trying to lock me into closed boxes like the Apple TV or the Xbox. I have an Xbox too, and a Media Center, so hear me out where I’m going.

Putting a MacMini on my TV is geeky. It’s not for everyone. Damn, I sound just like someone who discovered the Apple II back in 1977. Only the geeks got personal computing back then. Most people thought personal computers were stupid, back then. Heck, Wozniak offered to HP and Atari a chance to build his personal computer. They turned him down because revolutions in this business never are very obvious at the beginning.

Anyway, how is this a revolution? Ask my son. He now plays World of Warcraft on our 60-inch screen. He never really cared about the HD screen before. Or, look at Maryam. She loves putting pictures of Milan up on it. She also is crazy about Dave Winer’s new thing. More on that in a second too.

But why is this a revolution? Easy. It has a Web browser. It’s amazing how often I use the Web browser on the TV. “But you can’t read the fonts,” I can hear you saying. That’s not true. On the Mac keyboard you hold down the “Ctrl” key and then use your mouse’s wheel to zoom in and out.

The MacMini has totally changed my TV into something that’s NOT just a TV anymore. It’s revolutionary after you use it. Especially when you compare to the Xbox’s Media Center Extender (no Web browser) or the Apple TV (no Web browser) or my DirecTV box (no Web browser).

Why isn’t it a mass-market revolution yet? Three reasons:

1. They haven’t seen Dave Winer’s new software running on it.
2. The MacMini is too expensive to be a consumer electronics purchase (it costs about $700, and the Nintendo Wii demonstrated that consumer electronics needs to cost closer to $300, which is what the AppleTV costs, but the AppleTV doesn’t come with a Web browser so is ultimately crippled and will never participate in the new HDTV revolution).
3. It still seems a bit weird to hook a computer up to a TV (although the MacMini is ultra quiet, and cute so that it overcomes two of the previous objections that people had to bringing a computer into the living room).
4. Too many people assume a TV is just for watching TV and haven’t considered doing anything else on it. Sounds like the cell phone market before the iPhone, huh?

Anyway, what does Dave Winer’s new software do? It puts pictures up on my HDTV. “Huh, that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard,” I can hear you saying. But didn’t you also say that about Twitter? About IM? About the PC itself back in 1977? Yeah, yeah, you did, own up to it.

But it doesn’t just do that. It brings YOUR photos into my house if you put them on Flickr and I add you to my TV set. Even better, it puts professional photography up on my HDTV. Amazing images from around the world.

I love having great photography on my TV from my friends and from the best professionals around the world.

Oh, and the AppleTV does suck. I gave it to Patrick, maybe he can sell it to you so he can afford to buy a MacMini for his house.

Putting a MacMini on my HDTV was the best gadget purchase I’ve made this year.

UPDATE: I’ll demo it live over on http://www.qik.com/scobleizer as soon as it’s released. Dave tells me that should be tonight sometime, although it’s software so we’ll Twitter about it as soon as it’s done.

UPDATE2: we’ll be demoing it LIVE at 9 p.m. on my Qik channel. You can participate by leaving comments — I’ll see those on my cell phone.

Here’s the interview I did with Nick Halstead of Fav.or.it. Does he convince you to give up your RSS reader? The lockin on RSS readers is so strong for me that I can’t move. But there’s still a lot of people who will need an RSS reader. Does Fav.or.it have a chance against bigger, more entrenched RSS readers like NewsGator, Bloglines, or Google Reader (which is really gaining momentum now)?

Interview done during the geek dinner. That’s why I carry my camera with me cause sometimes I get pitched so well that I just have to get it on tape.

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.

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.

Nick Halstead cornered me at the geek party on Friday night in London and said something like “I have an RSS reader that’ll get you to give up Google Reader.”

“Oh really?” I answered skeptically. After all, I’m locked into Google Reader thanks to FeedHeads, which is just about to pass 10,000 users on Facebook, and thousands of people who subscribe to my Google Reader Shared Items feed, not to mention that Fast Company takes that and reprints the headlines, too, so switching readers is going to be pretty tough for me at this point.

Now, I get PR people to go away pretty quickly when they are pitching RSS readers to me by asking these three questions:

1. “Does it have a ribbon of news reading capability?” (I don’t read feeds folder-by-folder anymore, but just look at all items in Google Reader and “J, J, J, J” through them (which moves me to the next item). All feeds are mixed together. I’m addicted to this mode of reading.

2. “Does it have good keyboard commands like Google Reader?”

3. “Does it have a shared item feed like Google Reader?”

Nick answered “yes” to all the questions, but then he went further and explained how I could use his news aggregator, called Fav.or.it to comment on blogs and that it does a ton of other things that Google Reader doesn’t do (like it keeps track of your attention information and uses the APML format (it watches how long you read items, and whether you click on them, etc, to help build its ranking of items, which is also something that Google Reader doesn’t do, or if it does, doesn’t expose). Like I could use Fav.or.it to easily send items to Digg or Del.icio.us.

Anyway, I was very impressed with the demo that Nick gave me (I’ll get it up on ScobleShow when I get back home on the 17th) and will try it out. I guess I should try out FeedDemon again too and see how the rest of the Google Reader competition stacks up again.

Fav.or.it is in a closed beta right now, so I put my name into the hat and will try it out. Anyone using it? What do you think?

I’m having a good laugh all the way over here in London thanks to Fake Steve Jobs.

Oh, my. Turns out that Valleywag printed a rumor about Facebook’s founder that turned out not to be true. That isn’t all that different from the average Valleywag post but this one got picked up by a bunch of bloggers who drove it to the top of TechMeme (now the retraction is on the top of TechMeme, which demonstrates that there is a self-correcting function there). My friends and I have been comparing notes about what kinds of things get onto Valleywag and why we all love reading Valleywag (the insiders, at least, normal people have no interest in a Silicon Valley gossip rag).

Now that I’m over in London I get to see the media that Valleywag is patterned after. Over here they don’t have really serious newspapers. That’s what the BBC is for, after all. But every store sells these gossip papers that scream at you with huge type. They go for the most salacious of topics. Just like Valleywag does. After all, if Scoble picks his nose, that’s more interesting than what Oracle announced in a press release this morning, right? Heh.

Anyway, my friends have learned that they can quite easily game Valleywag and get Valleywag to print almost any damn thing. Here’s some rules for gaming Valleywag:

1. You need a somewhat credible source. So, if you want to get something onto Valleywag about me, or about PodTech, you’ve gotta have a former employee, or someone who works inside PodTech. Or, if you’re really good, you figure out how to get a Podtech email address and you send a tip that way. If you’re really good, you send an email from an email address that LOOKS like it might be coming from a PodTech employee. For instance, send them an email from robertscoble@podtech.com. Hint, we’re a “.net” but Valleywag doesn’t really check out news tips, so as long as things look pretty close you’ll probably get your rumor printed.

2. You need a story that’s both salacious and sounds plausible. Zuckerberg selling $40 million in stock fit both. Can you come up with some of your own? Heck, practice on me. “Scoble to go back to work for Microsoft.” “Scoble is a frigtard.” “Fat blogger almost killed in London.” “Scoble enters TechCrunch deadpool.” Etc. Etc.

3. The story must fit Valleywag’s story line. So, don’t bother sending a news article saying something like “Scoble turns out to be nice guy.” That will never get printed, even if you could add a salacious angle to it. Valleywag’s editors have decided I’m evil incarnate, so if you want to get something printed about me you’ve gotta make sure it fits that story line.

4. Send it at a time when it’ll be hard for them to check it out. Notice that that story about Zuckerberg broke on Friday evening. Everyone knows that PR people are harder to find on Friday evening cause they are usually out at the company beer bash or getting ready for a weekend, especially if they had a rough week. Remember: PR people have lives. Bloggers don’t. Take advantage of that. Truth be told Valleywag doesn’t call the subject of their stories anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. But the lie will go further if PR people can’t be reached for comment by other bloggers/journalists who MIGHT actually try to follow up on the rumor.

5. Send the story from multiple sources. Only one really needs to be halfway credible. The others will just ensure that the tip is taken seriously.

6. Take advantage of the fact that many bloggers will reprint the story as fact, even if it comes from Valleywag. This will soon wear off, though, as more and more bloggers realize that Valleywag is playing them. I’ve removed Valleywag from my link blog and didn’t print this item, even though tons of bloggers had printed it because there wasn’t a second source other than Valleywag.

Why do these tactics work? Because Valleywag doesn’t call sources to check facts and Valleywag doesn’t really care about whether something is true or not before printing it. Jason Calacanis wrote recently that he used this fact to get Valleywag to hype up his new company with a series of fake email tips.

So, why do we love this kind of news? The British press sure demonstrates that millions of people like this kind of salacious stuff.

1. We like human misery. Especially if someone more popular than us, or richer than us, is going through the misery.

2. We like talking about other people. “Did you hear that…”

3. There’s nothing like conflict to get our attention antenna up. A good fight gets us all worked up.

4. Sex sells. It’s quite obvious that lots of magazines and newspapers write the headlines before they even have any content. Look at the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, or a dozen of its competitors. I guarantee that at least one of them has a headline with something like “100 new ways to please your lover.” These kinds of headlines sell magazines and they never seem to change too much. So, in the tech industry, “100 new ways to piss off Mike Arrington” will probably get you more hits than “100 new Office 2.0 apps.” Even if it’s actually better for you to try out some new Office 2.0 apps. Heck, look at Valleywag right now. It’s all about Larry Page’s wedding and has salacious shots of him making out with his new wife.

Why am I writing about this? Cause I’m a sucker for all this. Even as they throw me under the bus again and again, I love it so much I keep reading it. It’s a personal bug of mine and one I’ve tried to work on, but everyone has to have their stupid addictions, right?

OK, enough fun on a Sunday morning from the gossip capital of the world. Back to more mundane things like testing out new RSS readers.