No matter what time of the day you tune into the Scoble radio station you will hear the sound of a thousand monkeys hammering away on their keyboards as they inundate the world of Twitter and FriendFeed with non-stop links and headlines.
Well okay, there might not be any monkeys but there is no denying the fact that there is a lot of noise being generated the moment you subscribe to Robert Scoble where ever he happens to be hanging his hat. He like to suggest that without being a part of the river of noise as he calls you are going to miss out on all the good and important stuff. For Robert this is all a part of being involved with the world wide talk show as he likes to refer to the web the rest of us try to wade through.
It is in this constant flow of information, comments and links that Robert has positioned himself as a major filtering point that we are all suppose to be able to use to find new stuff and interesting information. In essence as Scott O’Raw suggests, Robert has become our 24 hour a day radio host of the great wide web talk show. Even though in the comments of Scott’s post Robert would suggest that there are many others who could equally be considered as host there is no denying good or bad that Robert is the voice of the early adopters.
While he may not be equally liked by all of those that crawl the fringes of the Internet; and specifically things like social media, looking for the next great new shiny thing it doesn’t change the fact that Robert is the voice that can now bring along up to 20,000 new people where ever he goes. Sure that number may not seem like much but when you consider who is among his followers on Twitter or FriendFeed that number can easily double or triple as the trickle down effect takes hold.
For Robert, the larger the river of noise is the better it is as long as he is at the center of it
One other thing: being at the center of a conversation IS important if you are in the advertising/sponsorship business. Think that Rush Limbaugh or Ronn Owens aren’t doing the same thing in old media?
And the more people who use his station - so to speak – to find other interesting people or interesting conversations the better. This idea of Robert being the social media gadfly directing us to all the cool stuff might be nice but it also is doing nothing to make it easier to deal with the noise. In fact he is if anything making it even noisier with his scatter shot approach to sharing stuff with everyone.
While Robert might think he is providing us with a way to narrow down our own interests the opposite is happening because of the very number of people who are following him around. Just as having all those people; and then all their followers … and their followers, constantly sending him a tsunami of information to filter through helps him be at the center of this flow of information he turns right around and releases another wave of that same information.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like Robert and I think he does a lot to help move interesting ideas forward. This problem of noise isn’t just because of him and his love of being in the middle of a noise storm as there are many others like him out there even if they don’t have quite as many followers. The problem is more with how our information is being broadcasted and then subsequently tossed around among different social media services only to be repeated many times by everyone who feels like sharing at that time. Colin Walker has a good post on this duplication problem and why it really needs to be addressed.
As much as the aggregator services like to think that they are letting us distill all of this massive influx of often repeated information into an easy format for us to handle I don’t think they are. This is especially apparent the deeper you go into the early adopter ecosphere as we are constantly on the look out for more new things which means we are looking in more and more place for these new things. The more we look the more we become mired in information and it doesn’t look to be getting any better.
Look at this way … Robert sees (in his words) something of interest bubble up he then links to it and many time has a comment to attach to it. Now whether he is on Twitter or FriendFeed (or posts it to both which is what will happen if he posts on Twitter) that link and comments then spreads out to some 20,000 people initially. Then you take into account all the people who are following the people who are following Robert as they also will see it. Now add all the people who will see it via other people and decide to spread it all over again.
Like Alexander van Elsas I have to begin to wonder if this firehose approach to getting our information is as good as Robert thinks it is. As Alexander says in his post
But the early adopters feel there is a real problem with this non-stop social media conversation . It’s the noise problem (Try a search on “noise” here for example). How can we find the things that are really important from that huge pile of information floating around. That is partially why we have aggregation and filtering services. Each of them, using one algorithm or another, tries to compile a tiny subset of the universe and present that to its users. The question that remains is whether or not the right tiny space is presented.
I also think to that the way we make our connections within the whole social media space needs to be looked at as our only way to deal with this information tsunami and duplication. As Felix pointed out in a post today about FriendFeed and the process of selecting people to follow we more often or not default to a combination of following the A-Lister crowd and following as many people as we can. This method of getting getting our feet into the river of noise might be alright in the beginning but it could very well work against us in the end.
If you can’t stand the noise get off the Internet
Hi Steve,
A fine, well judged analysis. Robert said something to me via Twitter recently regarding Twitter's recent problems. I suggested that that, collectively, we should consider taking it easy on Twitter as it is, after all is said and done, a free service. Robert replied that it it wasn't, in fact, a free service as he paid for it in his attention. As Robert put it; “My time isn't free. Is yours?”
It struck me as a curious way of looking at things, but not an approach that I would necessarily dismiss out of hand. However, if this is a model of “commerce” that he finds validity in then I think it's something Robert should do well to remember i.e. we are all paying for Robert by OUR attention and we expect a decent ROI with less supercilious 'downtime'.
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Maybe it's as simple as this: we try new things, evaluate them over time, discard the stuff we don't like, and search again when we are ready to do so. Scoble's info stream is a problem of our own making. We can turn his main stream/show off at any time when we choose. Sure, there's the inevitable ripple effect that spreads into other people's info streams, so there's a powerful echo in what Robert says and does, but I guess that's inevitable.
Robert Scoble is remarkable, in the Seth Godin sense. He is what he is and we've collectively given him permission to have a long and wide broadcasting range.
There is one more analogy I could use, but I may save that for a post of my own.
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Ok, so he spread news, but this is how crap gets amplified too by him:
http://friendfeed.com/e/73bfa7fb-52ac-41af-9201...
The website harvests people emails and fills an aweber list. Imagine the size of the mailing list they have made! I doubt that this is completly innocent. A complete noob will see the trick, so how can HE spread such a crap? Poor followers… And even if it's innocent, It's still irresponsible, at least he should have some respect for his followers and verify before spreading.
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woah, I must have missed that one, Paul (thankfully). It's appalling that nonsense of this nature gates disseminated by someone who claims to act as a filter – where's the filtering here? And while we're at it, there should be a retraction from Robert that either a) he was taken in by this or b) he was in on the act – which if it is the latter, is, to my mind, utterly reprehensible.
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Of course you could just visit http://memegator.com and get the links that everybody is twittering about – then you don't actually need to read the tweets at all! – it eliminates all that tedious mucking about creating accounts and following people and their tweets
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I have long maintained that even though we are supposedly using these “free” services the fact is that as long as they use any of the content that we have generated through our investment of our time in order to create a business model where they get paid out as some point then the service isn't free.
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I have never denied that Robert isn't remarkable in one sense of the word or another. As I said in the post through his energy he has probably moved more than a few ideas forward that might not have been. I just think that we are *sometimes* investing to must time and assigning too much responsibility onto him as our almost early adopter defacto filter.
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Thanks for the heads up on this Paul.
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This reminds me of another web personality who loves to recommend software and one time recommended something to his readers which was rather quickly shown to be spreading malware. He got a lot of flack for that one – quite rightly in my mind.
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Thanks for the heads up on this Paul.
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This reminds me of another web personality who loves to recommend software and one time recommended something to his readers which was rather quickly shown to be spreading malware. He got a lot of flack for that one – quite rightly in my mind.
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You're welcome Steven
See you on friendfeed
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Yes, fair point – sometimes people just follow him for whatever reason. Maybe we need to think a bit more critically before following the Pied Piper.
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Yes, fair point – sometimes people just follow him for whatever reason. Maybe we need to think a bit more critically before following the Pied Piper.
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