Do you want to join Scoblebook?

Robert scoble at London's Geek DinnerIts worth watching or at least listening to this week in tech. Robert scoble tries to explain the twisted logic of the Facebook algorithm live. For 40+ mins!

Scoble says… “Facebook is running away with the game!

Really? As Clayton Morris says, the amount of curation Robert needs to do is shocking… Out of the 1 billion people who use facebook, the percentage who use lists is so close to zero even Mark Zuckerberg admitted it was kind of broken (thanks Nicole).

Nice try Robert but I certainly won’t be following suit… I’m actually trying to get off it or at least using it as a dumping ground again.

Self distribution and why not?

I’m with Kevin Smith on telling Hollywood to go suck it.

Writer/Director Kevin Smith premiered his new film Red State at Sundance today—he’d led everyone to believe that after the showing, he’d publicly auction the distribution rights to the highest-bidding studio. Instead, he bought it himself and used the attention generated to note how broken the studio distribution system is (why spend $20 million on a film that cost $4 million to make) and how he was convinced he could a better job handling things on his own.

Just like the guys who setup Revision3 and Twit.TV, they used there familiarity and popularity from the now defunct subscribe only techtv cable channel, to launch there own much more sophisticated and effective projects to basically replace techtv. The result is light years ahead of the old techtv shows in every respect.

Kevin Smith would be crazy not to "cash in" on his followers and reputation in this space. Its actually begs the question why he had not done it earlier really? Heck and whats wrong with a little shouting at the hand that use to feed you…?

It cost Red State roughly $4 million to make, and Smith didn’t see any sense in spending $20 million (i.e. 5 times the amount it cost to make the film) just to advertise it. Smith also was tired of huge marketing expenditures whose efficacy would be determined within a period of three days.

It does raise the question what do you do, if you’ve not got that track record behind you and your looking to self publish or self distribute but I’m a firm believer that the best will rise to the top. It may take 10 years, but they will get there in the end.

Apple, you can’t stop the signal

There’s are two winners from yesterday’s coverage of the ipad.

live.twit.tv and live.gdgt.com. Between the two of them, you could hear and see what was going on live on stage but also get a real feel for the presentation details with the whole host of screenshots from live.gdgt.com. Credit is due to these guys for making this all happen, shame on Apple for not just streaming the whole event. You can’t stop the signal…