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We rarely miss a chance to pick on relentless egoblogger Robert Scoble. But today, RoboScoble is hurting, and his hurt hurts like our hurt. Only his hurt runs about 2,000 words longer. How has tech blogging failed Robert since the halcyon days of 2003? Here's the executive briefing:

  • Tech blogs have shifted from being mostly about tech to mostly about business news, on the false premise that it's more important.
  • PR pros have turned blogs into outlets for their press releases and canned stories.
  • Bloggers bitch about newspapers, then turn around and emulate them by all running the same story at the same time, then arguing over who was first.
  • Factchecking? What's that? (Yes, we drop the ball here sometimes, but it's surprising how often we call a source who tells us we're the only site that bothered.)
  • Comments are overrun with jerks, spammers and unwieldy verification systems to prevent them.
  • Everyone chases the latest shiny new object, without following up on it in any depth.
  • Too many bloggers now have business conflicts of interest that slant their writing.
  • There's just too much blogosphere now. Filtering systems like Digg often bury the smarter stuff.

Scoble also complains, "Many of us can seem out of touch with the real world." I'm fine with that. You don't want to read about my mortgage.

(Photo by Mazy Kazerooni)