I watched in fascination over the weekend when the blogosphere went nuts over something that in the grand scheme of things isn’t that important: famed blogger Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to join PodTech.net. The surge of blog postings about this development, which then attracted the attention of the mainstream press, was worthy of a major international crisis or the second coming or something along those lines.
Even Scoble himself, who no doubt loved the attention, wrote about the crazy media storm. Now, another uber-blogger, Om Malik, is making a move. Om is quitting his day job as a reporter for Business 2.0 to focus solely on his blogging/web business. Based on the enormous response from the blogosphere (the news takes up half of TechMeme this morning) you’d think that Google just announced it’s buying Microsoft.
While it’s great that such a nice, smart guy is going to use his savvy to create something new, I find all this fascinating because it demonstrates one thing: the tech blogosphere is truly an industry unto itself. Moves by major tech bloggers become big news in the tech blogosphere, just as is the case with any industry or community or group. While not earth-shattering, these developments are HUGE events to tech bloggers.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:37 AM|Comments(1)
People can become very attached to bloggers they read every day. I don't think it's unique to tech. The same thing would happen if someone like Markos from DailyKos.com were to make a significant shift, or if the person behind thesuperficial.com was hired by People magazine.
Posted by: Ed Kohler at June 13, 2006 1:38 PM
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