Ironically my main Tablet PC died on the way down to Silicon Valley two days ago. Just won't boot. I have a spiffy new Lenovo model now running Windows Vista and Office 2007. But, I just spent 20 minutes typing up a blog post and IE 7 bombed on me, restarted, and lost my post. So, now I'm typing in Firefox. We'll see how that goes. Eating the dogfood of unreleased software isn't fun sometimes. Anyway, lots of things are happening, so let's see how many posts we can get done before the computer Gods decide they've had enough. Heheh.

Joe Wilcox analyzes yesterday's announcement that Microsoft is getting into robotics with an SDK.

Update: Channel 9 has a video with the team.

Fred Wilson got kicked off of Wikipedia for not being notable. Damn. Well, if that's the new bar, why am I still on there? I'm less notable than Fred is. That's lame. I think everyone should have a Wikipedia page. Everyone is important.

Steve Rubel writes about Bittorrent's role in a new HD video blog (Mariposa HD). Oh, this rocks!

Remember this day. In five years tons of people will be distributing their content this way.

Elizabeth Grigg tries a new approach to finding a new job. She is asking startups what they are looking for.

Well, in Silicon Valley I know a startup that's hiring developers who can copy whatever Eric Rice does. Heheh. 

In other words, can you make a Wordpress template? Do you collect more Wordpress plugins than Chris Pirillo does (last night at dinner he showed me his extensive collection) AND know how to install and use them?
Can you make a community with more audience-pleasing goodness than On10.net? (Check out their Ajax!)

Do you know more about search engine optimization than either Danny Sullivan or Matt Cutts? (Hint: you better be able to tell what Eric Rice is doing wrong on his Web site).

Do you eat Youtube or Google Video for lunch?

And do you do that all while building an empire in Second Life?

Well, leave your blog's URL here and start the bidding war over your talent! 

Mary Jo Foley has been covering Microsoft for a long time and her blog is always interesting. Anyway, yesterday Andy Plesser caught up with her and she said my new venture is going to be huge. OK, OK, will SOMEONE please turn off the hype knob? 

Wrong quest, sorry Hugh.
It's the small ideas that will transform big companies.

RSS? It was a small idea five years ago. Except in Dave Winer's mind. Today it's in Sharepoint, Outlook, IE7, among other places.

Blogging? Bill Gates hadn't heard the word five years ago. Today he owns one of the most popular blog services and has 3,000 of the most-respected corporate bloggers.

Podcasting? Videochatting? Hey, Microsoft still hasn't gotten that small idea, but another big company has (that company is Apple, check out the ad that Maryam is standing next to).

Want a big idea for Microsoft? Go to BarCamp this weekend. Oh, wait, that's being held in Microsoft's SF offices. I wonder if Microsoft will get the small ideas that are gonna be discussed on its own turf? Calling Ray Ozzie, calling Ray Ozzie!

David Hornik, who owns the venture blog, asks "who owns David Churbuck's blog?" Who is David Churbuck? He's a guy who blogs about customer service at Lenovo (they bought the IBM Thinkpad line). I'm looking at buying a new laptop. Lenovo is very high on my list.

Why shouldn't I buy one? 

To answer David's question: my name is for rent, not for sale. 

Video isn't as easy to consume as reading a blog, right? True. But why do I like it so much? Because it's a lot easier to see the true personalities come out. Both of these guys have had a huge impact on what I do. Joi is a Japanese venture capitalist (among other things). Loic runs Six Apart Europe. Very smart guys. And now you get to learn from their experiences.

Why does Jon Udell dislike the term "user generated content?" For the same reason I did. When I spoke at Google's Zeitgeist conference last fall I heard all the CEOs and important people speaking of how they were going to make gigantic new profits: user generated content. What is User Generated Content? Well, when you blog. Or add photos to a photo sharing site. Or when you tag some info or Digg it. Or when you leave a comment on a forum. Or, post an ad to Craig's List.

You see, lots of people out there think that you're gonna do all the hard work and donate it to companies so they can put advertising next to it. Only you don't get to keep the money from that advertising, no no no. You don't understand your place in this world, do you?

No, they are gonna take all your content AND take all the money that the advertising generates.

Even when you build your own thing on your own domain and spend time building your own audience they'll only give you 20%. Don't believe me? Come to any bloggercon and compare notes and see just what percentage of the revenues folks are being offered. I've done that and it isn't pretty.

I think this whole system is vile. Why? It's not sustainable.

Huh?

Easy. I've learned that "users" (I hate that term too) are smarter than me. Richer than me. More powerful than me. More connected than me. Cooler than me. Funnier than me. And are right more often than me.

They will figure out they are getting screwed and they'll move elsewhere as soon as there is a choice.

Stockholders will know this too so won't reward companies with high valuations because they know it could disappear as soon as someone else offers them 30% instead of only 20%. Google, on the other hand, has a high valuation because they aren't making most of their profits off of UGC, but instead put ads next to their search engine results which are far more profitable than UGC.

But, Scoble, aren't you joining a company that's hoping to make a living off of user-generated content?"

Maybe. (Right now PodTech makes most of its money off of corporate sponsorship of professionally-produced content, but I'd be lying if I said we weren't considering a UGC-based business).

Like I said, I'm studying this problem from both angles. As someone who develops content as well as someone who is — starting July 5 — going to be paid to make money with content, ala podcasts, blogs, vlogs, and Second Life experiences.

So, why is the Long Tail easily screwed?

Numbers.

Or, lack thereof.

Here, let's compare numbers. I'm supposedly an "A list blogger" and last week I had more than my fair share of good PR (way more, actually). I only saw about 200,000 new people last week and my average daily numbers are settling down again to about 20,000 daily readers, plus 29,000 RSS subscribers.

Sounds impressive, right?

They aren't if you want to sell advertising (something I haven't done on my blog).

American Idol, America's most popular TV show, had something like 60 million (I seem to remember they said that when I watched, but I'll have to look up the exact numbers and get back to you) and that show is part of a network of shows that has huge audiences, even their worst show has many times more audience than my blog does.

And, remember, I'm supposedly on the top tier, right?

So, if you start a blog, or a podcast, or a vlog, you probably will have much smaller numbers than I have. The tiny get tinier. Tiny things don't have power to argue about price with bigger companies.

The point of these small numbers means that we — as a group — don't have much negotiating power with advertisers.

Why? Advertisers don't want to deal with us individually. They aren't setup to do that. They need only a few places to get all their advertising, which is why the network model is so interesting as a business and why the VC's are spending so much money trying to get something going (ala PodTech).

How do the small content developers get a bigger percentage? Band together into an audience group in order to get advertising business. We know those groups as Yahoo, Google, MSN, and a few others. But, that means the group gets rich because it added the value while the individual starves for resources

These networks know we have no power. So, they are quite willing to give us pennies on the dollar to distribute their advertising (and, some aren't even willing to discuss just the percentage of the dollar that they are handing down the chain).

The Long Tail is getting screwed and there's nothing we can do about it.

Or, is there?

I'm wondering if there's a way for you to keep 100% of the advertising dollars, minus maybe a small transaction fee, that you generate. You bring your audience, you keep the moola.

But, let's say you join an audience and advertising aggregation network. Let's say that network sends you 50,000 people and you natively have 20,000 readers. Now, you keep 100% of the ads shown to your 20,000, but to the new 50,000 that you didn't have before, well, then you share revenue there of something like 80% going to the network.

Why does that work? Well, the network only gets paid if they add value above and beyond what you're capable of. Also, everyone gets the added power of volume. Obviously this would require a network that gets popular fast and has a good advertising distribution network, right?

Could such a network succeed? Or, are we going to continue to see the screwing of the Long Tail?

Or, is there something we could do to add enough value so that advertisers would deal directly with us instead of the big companies like Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

What would make you interested in joining an audience-and-advertising-sharing network?

Congrats Thomas Hawk on taking a new job with Zooomr. It's a photo sharing service. Thomas is one of the most talented photographers communicators I've seen.

I wish I hired him. 

Yeah, Anil Dash, you're right. Office 2007 is ballsy. I love using it and feel unproductive when I go back to the old version.

He totally nails why it's so hard to do something really different at a big company. Convincing everyone that you should change something big is a lot harder than it looks. My hat is off to the Office team. Interviewing Julie Larson-Green about Office is still one of my favorite videos.

Jeremy Pepper has been talking with me about this for a couple of weeks. There's a LOT of trademark infringement inside Second Life. I see brands being attached to lots of things inside Second Life. I like that, but in most cases it's not being done by the trademark owners. My son, for instance, bought me a virtual Apple Macintosh computer for my virtual office. That had the Apple logo on it. It wasn't "approved" or "built" by Apple. Someone else built the virtual item and is making the money off of its sale.

I can see how this will end up in court sooner or later. Why? Cause trademarks must be defended or else the trademark owner loses rights to them.

Anyway, Jeremy talks about the issue on his blog and starts a conversation about it. I wonder what Martin Schwimmer will say about this one (he is a lawyer and keeps the trademark blog).

Microsoft's video strategist Todd Herman is interviewed over on Beet.tv. Says that companies need to understand how to use the new media. He also talks about a new video project, code-named "Warhol" which will be Microsoft's YouTube competitor. This hunger for new content is one of the reasons I went to Podtech.

The cluelessness of the Yahoo recruiter is funny because he works for a search engine company. One, where, if he had taken the time to put my name into it he would have known instantly where I was going.

But, my favorite tool for recruiting now is Gada.be. Why? Cause it uses a ton of different search engines and brings back photos too! (Remind your kids not to post wacky stuff on their MySpace sites cause in eight years when they are trying to get a job guys like me are gonna have quite a laugh using tools like Gada.be.)

Anyway, here's Gada.be's result for "Scoble."

Think it's safe just to remain "off the grid?" It's not. If I can't find anything about you in Gada.be I'll pass on hiring you. It's just too risky. 

I'm trying to clean out my email (about 700 to go, but at least I got them all triaged into folders). One of the emails is from a Yahoo recruiter who has been talking with me on and off for the past few months. He keeps bugging me to send him a resume. He told me why a resume is needed, cause it'll help him find me a job that's a good fit for both of us.

I just wrote him back and said "I just took a job that didn't require a resume, sorry." Oh, I can be such a snarky jerk sometimes. Sorry.

Update: it gets even funnier. He just asked "where are you going?" Um, not to Yahoo! 

Since I'm joining a startup I'm looking for places to learn how to thrive in that environment. Someone emailed me StartupNation, which is a fun community, news source, and podcast for those of us in the startup world.

Richard Brandt is working on a book about Google and has a blog where he analyzes what Google's doing.

I like how Fred of A VC blog diggs into the competition between Netscape and Digg.

Everyone wonders if their startup will be the next Microsoft. Here's this year's hottest startups, winners of the Under the Radar conference.