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In Brief

Scoble's favorites

Robert Scoble, the geek commentator whose fame still mystifies me, once tried to answer a question — Who is the Adobe blogger? — about the web communications strategy of one of the key web software firms. The answer was staring him in the face. Scoble himself is the Adobe blogger. The publishing tech giant — architect of formats such as Flash for video and animation, and PDF for documents — began advertising with Scoble's employer, Podtech, iast September. Surprise, surprise: Scoble, who has claimed that his subject matter is never influenced by money, developed a sudden interest in Adobe at just the same time. For the data, read on.

As the chart shows, from one mention a month on the Podtech employee's influential personal blog, Adobe jumped to four. To be sure, the company is doing interesting things. Its Flash format has become the standard for video display on the web, and the new Apollo tools allow developers to build desktop applications. And I doubt that Scoble consciously decided to write more about Adobe to keep a Podtech client happy.

But Scoble's enthusiasm, more than that other writers, seems more highly correlated with Adobe's spending than with the company's technology breakthroughs. And this highlights a problem with the new trade journalism. The audiences are usually too small to attract significant advertising, so publishing companies rely on events and advertorial to cover costs. That makes them especially dependent, financially, on sources. And reporters, even those with the purest of motives, find themselves acting as glorified publicists. The new trade journalism, in fact, is much like the old.