“I believe that they should, our education over here in the US should help the US, er, should should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries”
Robert Scoble once again demonstrates that he is a a giant tool. Don’t get us wrong. We get link baiting just like everyone else, but the goal of link baiting isn’t to come off sounding as eloquent as Miss Teen South Carolina. His arguments are so bad that we aren’t even going to link to them. You’re smart enough to search for it if you wish to kill a few gray cells.
Scoble creates a video trying to seem like a mad scientist who has just made an incredible discovery and pretends like he’s using mental math to make an argument. Instead, he demonstrates that he has no data and an IQ lower than an Apache server. Duncan Riley follows as he’s not even smart enough to come up with a dumb argument like Scoble.
Here is why Robert Scoble is wrong:
1. The community is not infinite. Mahalo has no traction. GigaOm, a tech blog gets more traffic than Mahalo which is supposed to be a “search engine”. Search engines are supposed to be the highest traffic draws. Mahalo’s results in certain areas are decent, but most of the “cute information” is something that Google could pull just by scanning the Wikipedia entry for that title. Traffic to Mahalo is stagnating - it’s not quite the hockey stick for such a supposedly “social” site.
2. Social news and bookmarking sites do not have broad appeal. Digg has been out for quite a while. It has stagnated and traffic is not growing. After a few people with too much time on their hands dominate a network, others lose interest.
3. Passive technology is more rapidly adopted than technology that requires thinking and interaction. The inherent scalability issue with sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon is that there are only a limited number of people who really care about a topic and even fewer care to influence the search results for that topic. This is why Digg sucks - it’s dominated by a bunch of idiots. Do we really want our search results being influenced by pimply 25-year old geeks who still live in their mother’s basement?
4. SEOs will infiltrate this to an even higher degree than current search engines. Social networks are already overrun by spam. A tremendous percentage of pages on Myspace are spam. Many Facebook apps are spamming. Most social networks spam to grow big (ahem, Flixter). Web 2.0 is all about spam. Robert Scoble is spam.
5. Yahoo does not have “mojo”. Yes, it is true that Yahoo owns delicious and Flickr. So what? Flickr is mostly used by people in the San Francisco area - most of us don’t want our photos to be openly available to everyone. Then again, most of us aren’t desperate for attention. He argues that Google and Microsoft are screwed but Yahoo might be okay. Give me a break. Yahoo may be doing some interesting things, but delicious and Flickr aren’t part of the discussion there. The very fact that even extremely popular sites owned by Yahoo don’t have over 3000 bookmarks on delicious shows how worthless it is (and let’s not forget that it’s slow).
Scoble: 0
TechDumpster: One Googol
