I’m looking back at who has had a real impact on how I see the world. Thomas Hawk is near the top of that list. He got me enthusiastic about photography again. Now I carry my Canon 5D most days and when I don’t I hear his voice in my head “take pictures every day.”

Today on the way home I heard his voice in my head again and, so, on my commute home I stopped several times just to see the world.

First, I’ve passed by this oak tree hundreds of times (I used to work across the street from it) but I never really noticed it — how many common, everyday things do we take for granted and drive right by? One thing about photography is that it gets you to slow down a little bit and enjoy the beauty we have all around us. Something about the sunset got me to pull off of Sand Hill Road and think about the entrepreneurs that have passed by this tree. The Hewletts. The Packards. The Jobs. The Wozniaks. The Ellisons. The Gates’. And hundreds of thousands of others. It’s the tree at the top of Sand Hill Road overloading FWY 280 and Sand Hill Road. Off in the distance is the Stanford Linear Accelerator, the longest straight building in the world and home of the first Web site in the United States.

Sand Hill Road is where entrepreneurs come and pitch VCs in fancy offices and try to talk them out of funding. It’s a place for idealists. For dreamers. I was thinking that this tree has a business model better than most of the entrepreneurs who’ve driven past hoping to start a business. Heheh. Think about it. It’s lasted quite a few decades and probably has quite a few more left in its branches.

So, now, if you come and visit Sand Hill Road, you’ll look to your left as you get off of Freeway 280 and you’ll remember the tree with a business model that’s probably going to outlast yours. And if you get to Bank of America, go inside. It’s the nicest Bank of America I’ve ever been in. By the way, if you look closely at the bottom of the tree photo you’ll see a concrete pouring pumping machine. There’s a big new development going up on Sand Hill Road right across the street from the tree. Progress marches on.

One thing that Thomas taught me is to keep looking and keep shooting, even after you think you got the best photo. I laid down on the pavement to get another look at the tree. And then I looked down and saw this leaf. Something about it caught my eye because of the sunlight from the last few minutes of the sunset.

After leaving the tree and driving over route 92 I came across this sunset over Half Moon Bay and had to pull over again. Found some defiant weeds and realized I’ve got one of the nicest commutes in the world. Thank you to Thomas Hawk for putting that little voice in my head that says “pull over, make pictures.”

Also deserving credit is Marc Silber — we spent a couple of hours today at a Peets just brainstorming and talking about what we want to do in 2008. Hanging out with creative people does rub off and does make life richer. His lesson to me? Force yourself to use a 35mm lens. All the photos I took today were taken with my 35mm F2.0 lens. When I got home I discovered this lens is sharper than my others, which made me happy too.

Oh, and none of these photos have been retouched other than to apply a little unsharp mask. I see there’s a bit of dirt on my sensor. Gotta go clean that off. Someday I gotta get together again with Jan Kabili, who does Photoshop Online.tv and get some more workflow tips (I videoed her a year ago giving Thomas tips, time for another lesson!).

UPDATE: I forgot, all of my photography is public domain. You can steal it! Copy it! Use it in your mashups or in whatever you like (dart boards, etc).

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.

If you see a Scoble or two at the Tower of London this afternoon, don’t be shocked. Heh.

We had a great photowalk last night — man was it packed at the party Hugh put together. Really great people. Here’s photos that Tim Watt put up from the party and walk. Dave Winer has a nice photo of me, with Milan, and Maryam’s brother in the subway last night.

I just interviewed the development team of Resolver, a new spreadsheet that’s far easier to program than Microsoft Excel. If you build spreadsheets that have lots of code strewn throughout them you should check this out. It is the first application built in IronPyton I’ve seen too.

Hope you’re having a great weekend. We’re going to check out the crown jewels. Talk later.

Meet up here at 9:30 p.m. — the earlier geek dinner is sold out, sorry. I got everyone in who left an earlier blog comment, but can’t take more but we’d love to have you join us tonight for a Photowalking. Be there at 9:30 p.m. sharp, because we don’t know where we’ll go after that.

See ya from London. Photowalking on Friday evening is something I’m looking forward to. Posting will be light until the 14th when we get back. Although “light” for me doesn’t mean much. I’ll have London’s wifi zones scoped out within a few minutes of arrival. :-)

Seriously this should be an interesting trip. Milan (our 10 week old son) is going with us. Anyway, have fun and see you on the other side of the pond.

We’re taking the ScobleShow on the road, to London and Paris starting December 6th. We’ll be in London December 6-9, then in Paris for the LeWeb3 conference (which is selling fast and furious — it’s amazing that they have more than 1,000 attendees already).

To get things rolling right Hugh Macleod is throwing us a geek dinner in London on the evening of December 7th. Through some weird coincidence, Dave Winer is going to be there too. You’re welcome, but space is very tight, so let us know. I have 10 spots to give away, leave a comment here if you’d like to come. Hosting us will be cool people from the BBC and Microsoft.

We’ll also do a photowalk. Gotta think about when/where to do that. Any ideas?

Finally, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’d like to meet us in London or Paris, please drop me a note as well and we’ll get you onto the schedule.

Oh, and Milan and Maryam are coming too. If we can get Milan’s passport in time.

UPDATE: The photowalk will start at 9:30 p.m. after dinner — we can take unlimited participants in that — see Hugh’s post for more details.

Last night I met Cathy Brooks. She’s helping plan the LeWeb3 conference. I trust her opinion and she’s whip smart.

I showed her the Amazon Kindle device and asked her which book should be my first book I read on it. She recommended “Basic Black” by Cathie Black. She has been on the executive teams for a lot of publishing efforts from USA Today to Oprah’s new, and highly successful, “O” magazine.

I did something that I’ve never been able to do before. I bought the book right in front of her.

When I got home I started reading — I got about halfway through the book. I can see why Cathy recommended this book. Lots of great lessons about business and stories about the publishing industry, something I’m interested in.

Anyway, this morning I did a little video comparison to “real” books. I compared it to Blue Planet Run, a photo book that Rick Smolan just sent me (he’s a famous photographer who we’ll have on Photowalking someday if we can match our schedules up).

Hopefully this will be the last of my Kindle posts. Onto other things.

Photowalking with Thomas Hawk is grand, but today we have a real treat: a photowalk with a real professional photographer. Marc Silber. He even has the license plates to prove it! It’s long, but not boring. Just in case you don’t have the hour to spend Rocky made you a short and sweet editor’s choice for you.

Marc has written an eBook on how to take better photos, and we talk about some of the tips in the book. You’ll learn a lot on this hour walk. Plus you get to see some great scenery on a ridge above Palo Alto/Silicon Valley and hear some stories about the property because Marc used to live on the property, which is now a public park.

Oh, and I did almost the entire hour by walking backward. It’s a skill that only my parents would be proud of.

Thank you to Seagate for sponsoring my show and supporting digital photography through not only their storage devices but also by supporting my efforts to do educational photowalks like this.

On Friday I met one of the San Jose Mercury News’ photojournalists, Richard Hernandez. He’s worked there 13 years and showed me a project he’s worked on for the last few weeks. I shot this video with my cell phone, I’ll have a longer, more-professional interview up with both Richard and VuVox’s CEO up later this week.

This floored me as a way for photojournalists to cover news stories and other things in a new way.

What did Richard do? An interactive photocollage for today’s newspaper. Well, it’s not in the newspaper. But it goes along with an article that was done for the newspaper on one of Silicon Valley’s famous neighborhoods, Willow Glen.

This is the kind of stuff that bloggers rarely, if ever, do. It requires too much of an investment. Richard worked for a couple of weeks making images, collecting archive photos and videos and audio clips, and putting those together using VuVox’s new unreleased photo collage software. Richard used a pre-release version of the software to create this photo collage.

So, what is it? It’s a strip of photos. You drag it back and forth with your mouse. When you see an icon or a frame on top of one of the photos you can click and play the media that’s there. Sometimes it’ll be an audio story. Sometimes it’ll be another, more detailed, picture. Sometimes it’ll be a video.

I found myself mesmerized by the ability to tell a new kind of story.

Imagine going to a fire and taking an overall image and then laying on top of that video, audio, text (links to other stories) and having a much more complete photo story there.

Or, putting up a picture of a map where something happened and then linking audio and video off of that?

Or, for me, just a new way to show you my baby pictures?

Anyway, the longer video which shows how he built this will be up later this week. Richard also said he’d love to come along on a future photowalking and teach us a few things. Can’t wait!

Will this save photojournalism? Well, I imagine that this will draw new kinds of audiences to the Mercury News’ pages. Those audiences will stick around a long time (I’ve already spent 10 minutes playing around with it this morning, and I’m not even 1/8th of the way through it all). And they’ll be likely to click on advertising experiences (none are in Richard’s work, but he showed me how he could link off to Amazon, or other eCommerce sites and get an affiliate fee. Or, advertisers could just pay to have their brand included in the photo collage.

Nice to see the San Jose Mercury News is investing in new technology. I know they are having a rough time (Richard even hinted at it in the video when he joked he still has a job) but it’s things like this that will bring audiences back to newspaper brands and will give advertisers a new thing to engage with the Mercury News’ salespeople on.

Can’t wait to try it myself.

Here’s the photowalking we did a few weeks back of Stanford University. This is a fun 18 minute video where Thomas Hawk shares some low-light shooting techniques and we visit a variety of different parts of Stanford’s campus. More on the photowalk over on Thomas’ blog.

Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet, but I was touring the midwest and visiting friends.