Ensight - Jeremy Wright

I’ve just unsubscribed from every A-List blogger I read.

This includes Scoble specifically. See, this post was going to just be about Scoble, but I realized the reasons I was unsubscribing from his blog are valid across the blogosphere.

I consider Scoble a friend. Not a closer personal friend, but the kind I enjoy grabbing lunch with when I’m in Redmond, and the kind it’s fun to chat with whenever we both have time. It’s not like I make time in my week (or month) to talk to him, but he’s one of the reasons I started blogging…

… Which is one of the reasons this is hard.

You see, over the last 6 months, I can count on one hand the number of posts on Scoble’s blog that I actually enjoyed, truly read or got any real value from.

This isn’t his fault, really. His style was almost always “link to the best stuff, talk about the worst”. But the problem is that now that I’m connected, I get most of this info first. It’s kind of like Slashdot. In the good old days (ahem), it was one of the best sources for geek news. You put up with the roudy comments because it was always timely.

But now I get news faster than Slashdot, so I barely read it. It’s similar with Scoble.

The value in Scoble’s blog was always:

1. It’s Scoble
2. He was always brutally honest
3. He was humble

The problem, for me as a reader, is that this equation has changed. There ain’t much Scoble in there anymore. And while he’s still honest (ie: he’s not lying), his honesty now often comes across as defending Microsoft. Not always, by any stretch, but it does happen quite a bit. When he feels something’s off, he’ll still happily say so, though, so it’s not like he’s a shill. But, he has been affected by working at Microsoft.

Which is fair enough. Anyone who spends more than an hour there gets affected by it.

My real problem with Robert, and the A-List overall, is the #3 area. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say anyone isn’t humble. That’d be arrogance. But, Robert’s humility has definitely taken a different form lately. He’ll still apologize when he’s wrong. But, it’s changed.

I won’t go into why it’s changed, nor will I say Robert’s a bad blogger or a bad person. He’s a great person. Anyone who’s met him in person knows that the guy who appears on the front of scoble.weblogs.com is not the same guy you sit across the table from at Crossroads and talk about cool geeky stuff with. In person, Robert’s still mostly the same old guy.

So, I can’t really fault him.

But as a reader, I’m not finding value anymore in his posts or in most of the A-List’s bloggers I read’s posts. I love Doc’s blog. But beyond that, it’s kind of like Slashdot: the posts that are really valuable will get linked to by someone else.

It’s like the reverse A-List. A-Listers always say “if you want me to blog about your post, get others to blog about it”. Well, now I’m saying it back.

Again, I’m not unsubscribing as a friend. Robert’s a fantastic guy. I’m just unsubscribing as a blogger.

Maybe I’ll be back. Or maybe I’ll just read once in a while while eating breakfast (like I do Dave Winer’s blog, having never subscribed to it).

Either way, I’m done.

Maybe you, too, should re-evaluate your blog reading habits. If you don’t actually find value here, feel free to unsubscribe. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. Feel free to subscribe if you want to, or if you feel like there’s still enough “Jeremy” here. But if there isn’t, or you’re only reading because you’ve always read or because it seemed like a cool thing to do at the time, feel free to re-think that choice.

Blogging’s about relationships, about value, about authenticity and about authority.

If we can’t be honest and only read the blogs where we find value (personal value, professional value or informational value), there’s a real problem.

I’ve got a post half-written which talks about this in some more depth, but the gist of this long post is simple: I, as a reader (not as a friend), am no longer finding value in Scoble or the A-List.