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?

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.

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.

Cool. Just saw that Pownce released an API (pownce is a micro blogging/presence/micromedia tool similar to Twitter).

Twitter still has a LOT more flow. This will be interesting to watch and see what happens now.

Pownce is a better system for sharing media with your friends than Twitter or Jaiku, though. I like the UI better too, although the UI really doesn’t matter anymore. I am using a tool called “snitter” to read my Twitter stuff. It’s cooler than Pownce is.

That’s the power of an API.

UPDATE: Pownce’s founder, Leah Culver, has more details on her blog and Dave Winer has a first review up. Dave says the API is only about 1/3rd complete.

I love the Lunch 2.0 movement. Every few days there’s a different Lunch 2.0 event around the world. Today was one at Oracle’s headquarters. These are great events to network at and see some new stuff (Oracle was showing off how it is Web 2.0-izing some of its Enterprise-focused stuff and privately I got a demo of how Oracle is building its own internal social network which is very cool).

Anyway, here’s some quick videos I shot at the lunch.

1. Matt Galligan told me about his company, Socialthing, which will aggregate all sorts of friends networks. Alpha coming later in October, public release expected later this year. He called it a “digital life manager” and compared it to Jaiku.
2. Justin Kestelyn gave me a little tidbit of why Oracle was hosting Lunch 2.0. His blog with reports on the event is here.
3. Dominik Grolimund of Wua.la shows me this very cool Peer-to-Peer online storage service. I’m going to try this one out. He’s visiting Silicon Valley from Switzerland.
4. Jeremiah Owyang just came back from Hong Kong and explains Cyworld’s homepi to us. Rich Mangalang, of Oracle, was showing us their internal social network (sort of like Facebook, but only for Oracle employees). He wasn’t able to demonstrate it on camera, unfortunately.

Everytime I go to a Lunch 2.0 event I meet interesting people and learn a lot. Why don’t you come next time?

Watch my Kyte channel tonight. I’m headed to the Showstoppers CTIA event where I’ll find you some cool mobile gadgets and post them up instantly as long as there is some bandwidth.

I’m already getting sick of all the talk that the Jaiku acquisition by Google means the death of Twitter. Of course where is this talk happening? Twitter! Heh.

Tim O’Reilly put it right: Jaiku’s strength wasn’t as a competitor to Twitter at all. It was the mobile presence and aggregation features that I liked over on Jaiku. Jaiku has a mobile client, in particular, that’s really great.

The more troubling thing is that Google acquires companies and then we never hear about these companies again. Will that happen to Jaiku? I hope not.

As Jonathan Davies says, Jaiku’s other strength is in aggregating RSS feeds into one place. Interesting that Google is building a very strong position in the RSS ecosystem with Google Reader and Feedburner and now Jaiku. Interesting, will Google use its RSS position against Facebook? We’ll see come November 5.

Imagine if Google made a more open social networking tool than Facebook all via RSS feeds? Stick that into your RSS feed reader and smoke it!

Anyway, I’ve had a Jaiku account for a while and like it. Hope to see what they do next.

I was talking with a Google employee last night at the Graphing Social Media conference.

Aside: why are there more Google employees there than Facebook ones? I think Facebook’s attitude toward the community is saying volumes to all of us.

Anyway, he asked me to guess which Google service had the most page views every day.

Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.

So, what is it?

Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah. Now do you get why they just bought Jaiku?

Now do you get why the world is going to pay attention to what Google releases on November 5?

Yeah!

Facebook has real competition coming. Competition they haven’t yet faced.

It’s going to be an interesting period to watch them go at it.

I have 552 reasons to hate Facebook. I sure wish they would let me add more than 5,000 friends. If Google doesn’t have such a stupid limit that’ll get me to check it out, at minimum (I can’t add any more friends on Facebook).

A few months ago I interviewed the Jaiku founders. I found them to be very smart. This is a good purchase for Google. Add it onto their new social network that’s coming (Orkut 2.0) and Google just made a major move against Facebook.

Here’s one of my conversations lately (this conversation pretty much happened this way the other night):

FAMILY FRIEND: “Can you email me photos of your new baby as soon as possible?”

ME: “I’ll put them on my Flickr.”

FAMILY FRIEND: “What’s that?”

ME: “It’s where I share my photos.”

FAMILY FRIEND: “Why are you being a jerk, just email them to me!”

ME: “I will put them on my Flickr account. Flickr is a much better place for you to look at photos, plus I can get them there from my cell phone without doing any work so you’ll get them faster.”

FAMILY FRIEND: “How do I get to your Flickr account and why can’t you just email me your photos?”

ME: “Just visit my blog, I link to my Flickr feed there.”

FAMILY FRIEND: “I don’t know where your blog is.”

ME: “Go to Google and search for my name and you’ll find my blog.”

FAMILY FRIEND: “I don’t get why you can’t just email me them. Well, can you at least let me know when your new baby arrives via email?”

ME: “Yeah, I’ll do that on my Twitter account, which will also show up on my Pownce account, and on my Facebook account, among others, just watch those places with your RSS Reader.”

FAMILY FRIEND: “GGGggggaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.”

MARYAM CHIMES IN: “Don’t worry, he’ll email you. I’ll make sure of it.”

ME: Realizes this is pretty stupid but has a plan. I’ll email everyone when my Twitter account, Zooomr account, Flickr account, Facebook account, Pownce account, Plaxo account, YouTube account, Kyte account, Jaiku account, and my blog are all updated with baby stuff.

Yes, the birth of our baby is about to bring the world more email. :-)

Anyone have an email system that’d watch all the above for mentions of “Milan” or “Baby” and send out an alert to a preset list of people?

And now you know the trouble that these Web 2.0 sites will have in getting everyday people to try them out.

UPDATE: Barbara gave me heck for not having a Tumblr account, so here’s my Tumblr account. Heheh.

Plaxo, sometime in the next few hours will ship an online identity consolidator (that’s what they call it) based on microformats. What does that do? Lets you keep track of your identity from a group of online social networks.

I spent some time at Plaxo this afternoon and already have the video up.

And yes, Dave Winer, it’s all RSS all the time too. :-)

Why is this important? Because we keep our identity (and a different social network) on so many different sites. For instance, I have a separate social network on Yelp, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, Flickr, Upcoming, and other sites. What if one place could aggregate all your social network info from all these different places? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Yes, it would.

That’s what we discuss in the video.

My column is up about microblogging services and Mansueto Digital President Ed Sussman interviewed me about all this stuff.