TechWag

: Image via CrunchBase

Honestly, no one could be more surprised than I am about following in Robert Scobles footsteps. Back in August of last year I wrote a quick write up on how Robert got started in Social Media, blogging, and how he parlayed that into a viable career for himself. When Robert got started, blogs were still new technology, now we accept them as a day to day thing we read, visit, or do. Here is how my current career is following in Roberts’s footsteps 10 years after Robert got started with his career.

Robert had Dave Winer and Dori Smith to turn him onto blogs, and they told him that this is the next big thing, and they were right. I had a number of equally excellent people who turned onto blogs in 2005, and soon after I started talking about technology, and how to use it, I was picked up by Toolbox.com as a stringer. After a couple of years of writing at toolbox (and I still write on toolbox) I started my own blog, this one here, techwag, and have been keeping it going since then. Toolbox is my professional portal, they pay me, techwag is my passion, I love being here. You can see the parallels between what Robert was doing on his own blog, and what he was doing for Channel 9 when he was recruited from NEC to Microsoft.

We have both had our share of controversies in the mean time, from Kathy Sierra through to today and Michael Arrington along with the general state of hate messages that we sometimes get on our blogs, in our email, and in the case of Michael, up front and personal. While my controversies have not ended up in death threats (yet), I have been accused of everything under the sun, and even my parentage has been called into question. Thank goodness my Mom reads my blog(s) and she has a wicked sense of humor towards trolls.

We both use our popularity, or audience to evangelize the things we believe in, for me I believe that education has to enable students to be work ready. For Robert it is everything shiny and new, new toys, new people, new processes. We both passionately believe in what we are saying, and we discuss those issues openly. Because we are using our “fame” in a constructive way (most of the time, sometimes we fail to do this and it costs us each time) to promote or support the things we believe in, those messages come through, people listen, and we help people come to decisions about what they want to do, or what they want to buy, or simply (hopefully) inspire them to reach beyond themselves and do something wonderful.

We both have huge support groups, people we know, and we really truly appreciate. We are both open minded enough to listen to new voices. We even tick people off about the same time with our stances (and sometimes Robert and myself are on opposite poles of an issue or on a debate).

While we both use our fame for “good” at least as much as we can when we are simply talking about stuff and not being polarized by the tragedy or blogger outrage of the day we really do parallel each other. While I am just starting on this one, my social media project for the school has in many ways also paralleled Channel 9’s own development under Robert. This is where using the “Robert Method of Success” in some ways has seriously paid off for what I am doing here at work. Sometimes being an evangelist is a good thing, and going back through the public record of Roberts’s career is interesting, that method works quite well today, and right now it is working quite well for me.

While the parallels are spooky at times, in the longer run it will be interesting ot revisit this topic in about four years and see what this parlays into.