Scoble’s wrong. At least that’s what a good number of commenters say on my post yesterday.

On Sunday night I was being interviewed by Guy Kawasaki at the Stanford Publishing Course. Lots of famous publishers in the audience, including Scott Karp, who captured a few minutes with his video camera, and I told them this is why I like online media: it’s two way.

In old media if you see an idiot on TV you can’t effectively yell back. Today you can and I think that’s freaking awesome.

How do I know I really was wrong? Christopher Coulter agreed with me in those comments. He never agrees with me so I MUST have been wrong!

Hi5 is a social network that’s very popular. They are seeing 100,000 new users every day. Facebook is seeing 200,000.

Since Hi5 is one of the partners in the Open Social platform, along with about 16 other social networks including MySpace, I wanted to find out about the social networking space from a company other than Facebook.

Also, at Facebook you never get to interview the geeks who actually build the service, so when I got a chance to interview Akash Garg, the Chief Technical Officer behind Hi5 I jumped at the chance. Geeks usually tell more details than the CEO will. Akash didn’t disappoint.

We talk about a variety of things about the social networking industry as well as his opinion of Open Social.

I gave Andrew Baron, founder of the cool video show Rocketboom, a ride to the airport today and on the way I found out he is an Apple fan. So, we pulled off the freeway and visited the mothership. Why do I say that? Well, check out this T-shirt. Short video, just to make all my “your videos are too long and boring” critics happy! Heh. You can only get this T-shirt at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

I’m also uploading a longer interview I did with Andrew too.

Yesterday I visited Hi5 and when I was there Paul Lindner, the architect, handed me a Webvan pen. He’s holding the pen in this video. We talked at length about what’s going on in social networking (they are signing up 100,000 new members a DAY, which is about half the growth rate of Facebook but still very phenomenal). Anyway, he handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype. Webvan, if you don’t remember, was a famous online grocery service that blew through millions of dollars back in the heady days of the late 1990s.

It’s a pen I’ll always treasure and it’s sitting here reminding me to look deeper at the companies I report on. My more in depth interview with Hi5’s CTO will be up next week.

Sorry I’ve been a bit absent this week. I overbooked myself. I’m speaking at Streaming Media West in a couple of hours. Plus I’ve been getting a steady stream of videos up on ScobleShow (check out TapTu there, a new mobile search engine that, in our little test, blew away Google).

And, of course, I’m still digging through lots of feeds for my link blog. I see that the Google Reader team added some new features which I’ll try out later.

Yuri Ammosov, who lives in Moscow, Russia, and works in the Russian Ministry of Economics demonstrates why Russians aren’t cool.

1. He isn’t using an iPhone.
2. He isn’t using Facebook.
3. He’s reading blogs.
4. He’s running Russian RSS-reading software.
5. He reads Engadget, B5 Media, and TechCrunch.
6. He’s running Windows Mobile.

So yesterday. So uncool.

Just kidding.

Seriously, I spent a while with Yuri today and you should watch out for him and his band of Russian entrepreneurs. They are doing very cool things and I was jealous of the feed reader and the new interface he showed me on his Windows Mobile smart phone.

Now do you understand why Google announced Open Social and Android? I sure do.

There’s a lot of Russians who are going to buy cell phones and join a social network in the next 18 months. What will THEY be running? Will they think YOU are uncool for what YOU are running?

Longer interview coming soon on ScobleShow.com.

Wired blog has the details on the robotic car race. Tartan Racing (joint effort of General Motors and CMU) came in first, Stanford University, second. Two million dollar and one million dollar prizes, respectively.

Anyway, if you didn’t catch this interview, now might be a great time. It’s with the guy who runs the algorithms on Stanford’s entry.

This is a 60-mile race that is completed by computers. Pretty darn cool technology and a pretty big challenge for computers and the people who program them.

UPDATE: Popular Mechanics has details on the winners.

I used my cell phone to record a very short interview with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and MySpace’s CEO, Chris DeWolfe, about what this announcement means today.

Words are heating up between Mozilla’s Brendan Eich (he’s the chief technical officer at Mozilla Corporation, the folks who bring us Firefox) and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson in the debate over the proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition. We haven’t heard the last of this and it’s interesting to see this play out in the public square. I’m scheduled to do some interviews already with Mozilla. Would love to have more to cover this issue more completely. I first reported on this friction on my blog last night and some of the comments there have been interesting.

UPDATE: I should have given credit to Ric of OpenAjax for starting this off and helping me see the conflict brewing here.

I spent a lot of time recently catching up on NewsGator. If you’re interested in the RSS world and what’s going on you should check out these two videos. In them they explain how Newsgator is making moves into the Enterprise. You can see how the approach here differs from Bloglines, who was on my show yesterday.

There are two videos.

1. A demo of the new Enterprise-focused synchronization system. Five minutes.
2. A discussion of NewsGator’s moves into the Enterprise. 21 minutes.

I included the demo on this post here, but in the interview you’ll hear RSS reading trends inside corporations. NewsGator’s stance here is unique and hearing from them about how companies are using RSS is interesting. Jeremiah Owyang, social media analyst at Forrester should check this out. We talk at length about what NewsGator’s new integration with Microsoft’s Sharepoint means and how it can be used.

NewsGator includes a variety of feed readers including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and the various NewsGator clients. They’ve really built a system that goes way beyond what any other feed reading system does.

When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.