The old saying, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt," apparently applies to Silicon Valley as well. Podtech video blogger Robert Scoble's tech analysis cred took a nosedive yesterday after he released what was supposed to be an in-depth – video explanation of "why Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years." Stop laughing, read on.
Armed with a white board, multi-colored markers, flop sweat and probably a little too much coffee, Scoble spent well over half an hour drawing unsupported connections between the afore-mentioned butt-kickers and the future downfall of Google.
Among Scoble's many thought crimes is his recycling of Jason Calacanis'
idea that a human created directory is a search engine. For the last time, a human-edited directly is not a search engine, it's a curated data pool. Ironically, Calacanis himself saw through Scoble's enthusiasm masked as analysis and responded by saying, "Clearly something is happening here (and you don't know what it is... do you...
Mr. Scoble)."
Keep in mind that by merely mentioning Google and Mahalo in the same sentence Scoble did Calacanis a huge favor, so the soft admonishment from Calacanis speaks to the level of inaccuracy of Scoble's presentation (rant? job application?). Adding to Scoble's tragic video folly is the fact that just weeks ago, following Calacanis' Gnomedex presentation, Scoble wrote via Twitter, *"*Calacanis dug his own grave here," and, "If I ran a conference and I invited Jason I'd just call the conf. session 'an ad for Calacanis.'" An interesting critique considering that Scoble's new video—in which he digs his own grave—feels like a corporate promotional spot for Mahalo.
Other bloggers of note have piled on, most notably Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineLand who penned a massive 4,000 word screed against
Scoble's video and Rand Fishkin who started off his post with the pithy title
"I Used to Respect Robert Scoble's Opinion..." While we always suspected Scoble's too-quick adoption and evangelism of [Fill In The
Blank] Web 2.0 technology spoke to an irrational exuberance unsupported by logic and insight, this video serves as final confirmation.
