As others have noted in his blog comments - up until a few months ago his site was absolutely terrible and now he's already on his high horse.
Glass houses.
Don't worry he's not actually famous he's just tech scene famous, which is similar to winning the special olympics. Ask your Mom, non CS college professor, Grandpa or neighbor who he is. They won't know.
The short of it is, in all honesty, the only way I know of this guy is through news.yc.
The long if it is I avoid the high traffic sites like techcrunch and reddit, as I really don't feel I get much value out of them, for part of the same reason I stopped reading slashdot some time ago. News.yc is my main source of startup news at this time. Even then, I think the stories/news links have been getting more diluted with crap since I started visiting here. (I'm to blame too, as I've submitted some fluff myself).
Well, except there is actual money to be made in being "tech scene famous." He owns a house in Half Moon Bay, probably earns a nice six figure salary to do whatever the hell it is he does, gets lots of freebies (he was at frigging Davos), and probably speaking fees. Of course, I don't know, there might be actual money in winning the special olympics.
And I'd bet any CS college professor (that's any good) doesn't know who he is, either.
True, but eventually most talentless hacks are filtered out and even if Scoble isn't, he's still an epic joke. There's money & free goodies to be obtained winning the special olympics as well.
Also from my understanding, he used to be largely sponsored by Seagate right? I don't get what value he brings to sponsors - seriously. When Arrington or Fred Wislon recommend something I at least check it out.
When I think of Robert Scoble I think: "too many cheeseburgers, annoying perpetual laugh and bad writing" NOT "I better buy whatever he recommends."
What does he actually _do_? I still don't understand. As far as I can tell Robert Scoble is the Washington DC or Paris Hilton of the tech scene.
My experience is that in the Bay Area, there's a critical mass of "talentless hacks" that basically support each other and create barriers to entry for actual talented people. Scoble is their king. Sarah Lacy is queen.
That being said, there's a ton of really talented people in the same area, just that most of them have either cashed out, work for Google or Apple, or are so busy building stuff that they don't have time to blog crap.
I'm blushing ;-) Though seriously I was in the center of it all for 2 years so I think my impression is, at the very least, an honest opinion. Which is something that seems exceedingly rare in the Bay Area.
Because he has several hundred feeds in his RSS reader and engages lots of individual bloggers in conversation. You'd think that if you started a new blog, you'd have to get it really big before guys like Scoble would link to you. But in reality if you start a new blog then Scoble will probably be the first one to link to you, because all he does is read blogs and link to the posts he likes. Then people link back to him and his own site gets popular.
i'm not excusing his lousy attitude. He should be more careful assuming he has an audience. What I understand though is that it's not his first time to demonstrate such attitude.
I don't quite understand why Hacker News is giving attention to this guy.
