Review of ScobleShow

One of the PodTech Network’s most popular shows, ScobleShow has been on the air since the online network’s redesign in September 2006. Produced by PodTech’s Vice President of Media Development Robert Scoble, the show gives viewers intimate access to the major players of the new media landscape. A blogging wizard, Scoble has been interacting with electronics and information technology since childhood, when his father worked at Ampex and Lockheed Martin. He is the author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, which established him as an early industry leader, producing content for the NEC Mobile Solutions site and Microsoft’s MSDN Video.

Engineers, company leaders, and media developers are all interviewed in the show’s four segments. The first is CEO Talk, which is fairly self-explanatory and features everyone from the Vice President of Dow Jones to the Editorial Director of the Holy See’s website. The second is Photowalking, where Scoble takes a walk with well-known photographers and the leading entrepreneurs of photographic technology, discussing techniques, innovations, and recent trends with artists like Thomas

Hawk and artisans like ZoomAlbum’s Doug Rowan and Scott Beale. There’s also For Developers Only, which is like CEO Talk, but with developers like Krugle’s Ken Krugler and Vodpod’s Mark Hall. And then there’s the most interesting of the four, The Pitch, where budding entrepreneurs are allowed to give a pitch or a demo of a product new to the market like ODesk, Gigavox, and UrbanSeeder. Instead of appearing in sequence, the different segments are posted separately and whenever available, meaning that one to two video segments are released daily. Videos look professional with minimal editing and a high-quality polish that makes the show look like a major broadcast competitor. ScobleShow’s segments can last anywhere from five minutes to a half hour, but most average around twenty minutes long.

The briefest tour around the site will ensure that you knock into phenomenal and informative content at every turn. Some of the videos that stand out discuss the history of electronics and make forecasts on the future of internet technology, like this walk around CERN, which housed the world’s first web server, with Ben Segal and Jean-Francois Groff. There’s also these interviews with Paul Kunz and his team, developers of the first American website at the historical Stanford Linear Accelerator.