Robert Scoble in Dublin

Robert Scoble dropped by the INDA event in Dublin this evening and gave a talk on blogging. He also was part of a Q&A panel afterwards with Nick Grattan, Paul Fallon and Kieran Lynam. another guy whose name I missed (Brian, who was he?)

He seemed a bit bombed, the Cork guys must have kept him up yesterday, and his talk was hesitant and disjointed but even so some interesting points were brought up and it was worth being there. I also got to see his beautiful wife Maryam whose blog got 64,000 hits in its first two months.

It is a bit late, we left Dublin at 11pm and just got back to Waterford now, so I'll just bullet the interesting bits I noted down:

1. Scoble really likes Gaping Void. He used his cartoons in all his slides and Robert's business cards were scribbled by Gaping Void.


2. Robert can down two pints of the good stuff within the course of a panel discussion. You know you are in Ireland when the bottles of water are left unopened and the main speakers have pints of Guinness in their hands, while they talk.


3. He made a good point about people who really can't, or shouldn't, blog even though they have interesting things to say. e.g. a librarian for the Library of Congress who has congressmen, senators and the like who wouldn't appreciate anything going onto a blog. Scoble said "probably one of the most interesting people [the librarian] I have met."


4. He mentioned how the media landscape has changed from just a couple of news-breakers (e.g. Walt Mossberg) to millions today, through blogs e.g. a kid in Australia (he really likes mentioning this kid in Australia) who knows the CEO of a company with journalist around the world using Pub Sub etc. watches on their "beat".


5. This is me; There is still a divide between the United States and Europe in technology. He brought up the Tivo and while most of us know what one is, nobody in the room except Scoble had one. I see the same thing happening with many web services e.g. Google Local


6. Memeorandum watches just 1000 Scoble picked blogs for breaking news. You need roughly four of those blogs to link to you to get onto Memeorandum. Also the faster you talk about a subject the better your chances. If you wait too long to post your item on an article then that window of opportunity in the conversation'osphere will have moved on. I feel we shouldn't be going down this "next hot thing" track, but oh well.


7. TechCrunch is Scoble's favourite blog at the moment. He mentioned how 6 months ago it didn't exist and has now blossomed into a leading voice on the web.


8. The Channel9 forums are run on Community Server.


9. Scoble talked about how there is a kind of membrane you can stretch so far with your corporate blogging. That Google chap who got fired for blogging was also mentioned and Robert reckons the main problem was he didn't understand the risks properly and didn't go in with a plan to stretch that membrane intelligently.


10. Duplicates are irritating Robert. Some feed search engines treat his RSS and Atom feeds as separate sources; dumb, dumb, dumb.


11. In the panel discussion...


12. Robert mentioned the Windows Vista network stack was rewritten and that they have seen a 40x improvement in networking.


13. Paul Fallon and Nick Grattan talked about 64bit and what it benefits. SQL Server gets a big boost but there was some disagreement on whether it helped out on client machines.


14. WPF was mentioned and I asked if any of it would port over to the XBox 360 since it was going the home entertainment route. I was told that actually the 360 was a Media Center Extender and a typical household would have a separate Media Center box and a XBox 360. The 360 would simply stream video and simple apps from that Media Center box.


15. Robert said a developer he knows quotes "No good code is written before midnight." Amen.


16. Paul Fallon talked about how Microsofts reach is now so broad that no developer can have even a reasonable understanding of all Microsoft aspects. He sees us all specialising. To go with that Scoble said how he has for the last year been wandering around Microsoft with a video camera and has only seen 500 out of 60,000 employees and probably only 60% of the product groups.


17. Nick Grattan's advice on the CLR in SQL Server is "If you are thinking of using Server Side Cursors, that is the time to use the CLR. Otherwise, use TSQL."


18. Scoble says that Live.com will be the homepage for Windows Vista. Wonder what that means for MSN?


19. An Argentinian developer in the back talked about how the 5 Star developer program in Argentina had skilled up 10,000 developers with .NET. We need something like that in Ireland (though 10,000 Irish .NET developers is unlikely.)

Here is a photo of a diagram Robert drew in OneNote (click for the full-size):


I thought it was interesting. I brought up Project Comet which I think will fill that gaping boid at the bottom left.

And that is about that. Thanks for coming Robert, was good to meet the legend.