Dinner with Robert Scoble

How will you know that Microsoft has fired Robert Scoble? When Google Ads show up on his blog! It's one of the jokes Scoble told a group of bloggers at a dinner in Brussels yesterday.

I had the honor to meet Robert Scoble, famous tech blogger and technical evangelist at Microsoft. David Boschmans from Microsoft Belgium had arranged a geek dinner in Serenata, an Italian restaurant in Zaventem near Brussels Airport. Some ten Belgian bloggers had registered for the dinner with Robert and his wife Maryam.


Yes, he reads 1000 weblogs a day. He's a big fan of Memeorandum, a blog tracking service like Blogsnow or like my own Blogium, only faster and more sophisticated, with a lot more features, like showing related items. Memeorandum comes in two versions: a tech version and a politics version. He also is a big fan of Digg.com, the new and trendy place to discover hot tech links.


When he heard me mention "Ajax" to David Boschman, he asked "Will it take another eight years for the market to discover what Microsoft has done?". Meaning that AJAX-like techniques were already present in Outlook Web Access back in 1997.

Together with Shel Israel, Robert has written a book on corporate blogging: Naked Conversations - How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. You can pre-order it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. It will become available at the end of January 2006.

I also had interesting chats with David Boschman and Tom Mertens from Microsoft Belgium. One of the cool promotion tricks the Belgian Microsoft guys are doing right now is this post card from Belgian cartoonist Quirit for the MSDN Communities website.



There's more to read and to see on the blogs of Coolz0r and Wim Verhaeghen .

Earlier that day Belgian public radio VRT (the 'Studio Brussel' channel) had an interview with Robert and Maryam (MP3, 32kbps, 1MB).