I challenge "one of the MOST influential people" as vigorously as is posthumanly possible.
Off the top, how many people here who are both under 30 and hack on something (hardware, wetware, anything) know who scoble is? I only vaguely remembered his name with effort, and even that may have been by analogy to somebody else.
In fact: the more I look into him, the more the expression "never-was" (as a more extreme form of "has-been") comes to mind. Just step through his wikipedia entry⁽¹⁾ and it'll be hard to disagree with the assessment:
> 4 Appearances
>
> In November, 2013, Scoble was co-keynote speaker with
> Shel Israel at the 2013 Telstra Australian Digital
> Summit. Scoble and Israel talked to their book titled
> "Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of
> Privacy".
read: noise.
> On April 1, 2008, The Register ran an April fool’s spoof
> claiming Robert Scoble was actually an IBM bot.
read: a stumbling, college newspaper-esque exercise⁽²⁾ in retrofitting a disposable assignment (april 1) to trash-talk scoble openly. unambiguously dripping with disdain, really.
> On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show
> at NewTeeVee Live […]
at what now?
> [f]eaturing other internet celebrities such as Veronica
> Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Cali Lewis, Kevin Rose, Justin
> Kan, and others.
who? there are two tech names here, and zero celebrities.
> On November 6, 2006, Scoble appeared as a panelist on a
> Chinese Software Professionals Association event called
> "The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing
> on Media and Marketing".
read: noise.
> 5 Milliscoble
>
> In September 2008, Follow cost, a website which
> calculated how annoying it would be to follow anyone on
> Twitter, invented the milliscoble unit of measurement
> defined as: "1/1000 of the average daily Twitter status
> updates by Robert Scoble as of 10:09 CST September 25,
> 2008." At that time, Scoble was averaging 21.21 tweets
> per day, so a milliscoble is 0.02121 tweets per day. A
> person with a milliscoble rating of 1000 will be as
> annoying to follow as Scoble.
read: further open contempt of scoble as shitposter incarnate.
So what do we have? A guy who had some kind of readership as a microsoft evangelist 13+ years ago, then circled the drain of ~web tv~ for a decade, then landed an Entrepreneur in Residence gig — read: unpaid internship⁽³⁾ — ultimately just circling a slightly newer, slightly shinier drain (VR).
One who, along the way, consciously uncoupled⁽⁴⁾ from all the content streams and personal branding whose maintenance constitute the entirety of an independent writing career. The blogger's own site, at .blog no less, is a contentless placeholder now.
We're left with some sorta phantasm of a now-defunct, still-not-tech personality: a never-was.
If the Ghostblogger of Milliscobles Past can kill your startup, your startup almost certainly didn't need to exist.
Off the top, how many people here who are both under 30 and hack on something (hardware, wetware, anything) know who scoble is? I only vaguely remembered his name with effort, and even that may have been by analogy to somebody else.
In fact: the more I look into him, the more the expression "never-was" (as a more extreme form of "has-been") comes to mind. Just step through his wikipedia entry⁽¹⁾ and it'll be hard to disagree with the assessment:
read: noise. read: a stumbling, college newspaper-esque exercise⁽²⁾ in retrofitting a disposable assignment (april 1) to trash-talk scoble openly. unambiguously dripping with disdain, really. at what now? who? there are two tech names here, and zero celebrities. read: noise. read: further open contempt of scoble as shitposter incarnate.So what do we have? A guy who had some kind of readership as a microsoft evangelist 13+ years ago, then circled the drain of ~web tv~ for a decade, then landed an Entrepreneur in Residence gig — read: unpaid internship⁽³⁾ — ultimately just circling a slightly newer, slightly shinier drain (VR).
One who, along the way, consciously uncoupled⁽⁴⁾ from all the content streams and personal branding whose maintenance constitute the entirety of an independent writing career. The blogger's own site, at .blog no less, is a contentless placeholder now.
We're left with some sorta phantasm of a now-defunct, still-not-tech personality: a never-was.
If the Ghostblogger of Milliscobles Past can kill your startup, your startup almost certainly didn't need to exist.
____________________
¹ http://enwp.org/Robert_Scoble
² https://theregister.co.uk/2008/04/01/ibm_scoble_nano
³ https://scobleizer.blog/2016/05/17/mental-blocks-resource-co...
⁴ https://scobleizer.blog/2012/07/02/scalable-livin