You make a good point about how Scoble’s curiosity drives him to check out all kinds of new stuff. This is a hallmark trait of a geek. Plus, it’s nice to have someone working out the kinks first.

Reputation and influence are funny things. Someone should write an algorithm that calculates the relative value of any give keyword . . .

Oh.

I have a sort of bubble, too, just like Jake. In my bubble, people like Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Kevin Fox (former UI designer at Google), and Paul Buchheit (the original developer of Gmail) are small-time celebrities, and a lot of people I talk to don’t know who they are at all. It’s only natural, I guess, that someday, someone would talk about someone I’ve never really understood all the hype about. Scoble has been that person for me, and Jake was the one who mentioned him.

On the plus side of this, I now know something about who Robert Scoble is.

Obviously you missed one of Scoble’s more recent posts, “Switching to Gmail.”

I have never met Scoble personally, but I’ve had some (positive) exchanges with him on his blog and on Twitter.

One thing that you can say for him, and for many other people interested in social media, is that they have a willingness to explore. Many of these explorers try out Gmail, or FriendFeed, or Google Reader, or whatever, just to see how they work. What’s more, many of them set up their own admittedly silly services, such as Club140 and Atlocals, because they can.

In one sense it’s silly, but on the other hand it gives people ideas that can be applied to sites such as Oracle Mix.

I’m sorry if that comes across as overly harsh, but the guy just doesn’t light my fire.