Dave Winer wrote today a post that is a second cousin of a post that has been rolling around inside my head since we learned that Scoble gave Microsoft the Mississippi half-step uptown toodleoo for startup Podtech.

Dave talks about how big Scoble’s presence in the blogosphere and beyond has become- and rightly so, given all the work he has done to make Microsoft relevant in the blogging/RSS space. Dave calls Scoble an “evangelist” in the Guy Kawasaki mode. Evangelist is a word that I have used with approval in a similar context that means someone with an agenda who is smart, well liked and has a strong personality. Evangelists are fishers of men and motivators of people. But sometimes, by doing what they do so well, evangelist types tend to overwhelm the systems within which they work and, while perhaps not in Scoble’s case, but definitely in others, can sometime face resistance and resentment from the coat and tie establishment. Or as I have said to colleagues, they too often are rightly loved downstream and wrongly despised upstream.

My thinking over the last couple of days is more along the lines of what Scoble’s departure tells us about corporate America and the blogging movement. I can’t help but think this is a stormy forecast for company acceptance of the blogosphere as a legitimate marketing and information distribution channel. Scoble and others have made it clear that Microsoft did right by Scoble. But if a huge tech company with billions of dollars in the bank hasn’t embraced the blogosphere enough to keep the single biggest personality in the blogosphere on its payroll, can we assume that maybe Microsoft (and likely other big companies) believes that the blogosphere is little more than an online geekfest full of people who are either already customers or not likely to become customers.

Stated another way, is the blogosphere where the customers aren’t?

Sure, there is an army of bloggers at Microsoft, but no one will deny that Scoble was the commander and chief. The successful move to keep Scoble in Redmond would have started months ago, not days or weeks, ago. I don’t know if this is just a big coincidence or tea leaves demanding to be read, but I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t more evidence of the marginalization of the blogosphere by big business.

As far as Scoble’s new gig goes, I had never heard of Podtech until the Scoble news broke- which means that he is already doing his job. I started out thinking podcasts were too hard and that nobody listened to them. Now I think they are too hard and I do one every couple of weeks. I don’t mind hard because I am interested in technology, but a whole potential podcastees do and aren’t.

Do I think podcasting will take hold in mainstream America. No, not as long as the RIAA is still circling around to make sure nobody puts anything on a podcast that mainstream America really wants to hear. But is it a growth area? Of course.

And of course I note that podcasting, unlike software, is one industry that is joined at the hip with blogging and RSS. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Whether he’s promoting software, podcasts, religion, apples or bass-o-matics, an evangelist’s job is to take the message to the people. I have no doubt that Scoble’s new message will soon be heard loud and clear.

It’s the other message I’m thinking about.

Early 2006, like late 1989, was the year the wall came down. There was a lot of good conversation about gatekeeping in the blogosphere- the much debated phenomenon whereby the bloggers with the largest readership link primarily to each other and guard carefully the door to the elite blogging clubhouse. As a result of these discussions, a lot of people decided the blogosphere should be a free and open place, where new voices would be welcomed and everyone could join in the conversation.

Quite a few A-List bloggers did their part to promote and nurture the open blogosphere concept. Some even drew maps for the rest of us to use on Blogger’s Hill.

That was a good thing- for everybody. Because it is fair and just, sure. But also because the blogosphere is tiny in general (some people continually forget this)- and the tech-related blogosphere simply cannot survive and stay fresh without an inflow of new voices.

But after the walls came down, it seems a few of the old clubmembers began to feel anxious about the public and potentially crowded nature of the evolving blogosphere. A few seem to be suffering from agoraphobia. They have decided to build some new walls around themselves in an effort to recreate the blogging caste system that seems to be their safety zone. Several people (like Mathew Ingram and Scott Karp) do their best to convince these faux agoraphobics to get treatment, but their cries fall on deaf ears- because these agoraphobics (unlike real ones) don’t want to be cured. They just want their walls back.

Some, like Seth Godin and Russ Beattie (who later stopped blogging altogether), decided that interacting with the rest of us is just too much trouble. Others, most notably Steve Gillmor and those under his influence, argue that conversing with the rest of us is bad for their reputation and makes them seem less of an authority. I’m sure glad my college and graduate school professors didn’t think that.

Here’s the thing (again). There are no rules that require anyone’s personal web page (be it a blog or a walled in soapbox) to look a certain way or to link here, there or anywhere. Not wanting to talk to the rest of us is OK. Turning your blog into a personal newspaper or magazine equivalent of a one-man band is fine. Really.

The problem is that some of these faux agoraphobics want us to believe that they are making all of these decisions based on logic and reflection and with an eye toward the greater good, when the fact is they are being made primarily as a result of unchecked human nature and for personal gain. Cattle ranchers, miners, merchants and bloggers all benefit from being there first. The early arrivals get the best land and a head start on mining for gold and readers. When the gold rush starts and the rest of us head west, we are encroaching on their land and their fortunes. What began as a head start for them has transformed into a God-given right that demands protection. So ranchers, miners, merchants and bloggers try to circle the wagons against the newcomers. This isn’t some story I’m making up- this is history. Grab a book and check it out, or turn on the Westerns channel on DirecTV.

Add to that concept the other human need- to belong and exclude, and you can understand why the open and crowded blogosphere (or the possibility of it) is a ripe breeding ground for faux agoraphobia.

The absurd lengths some people go to in a silly and transparent effort to separate themselves from the rest of the blogosphere makes me wonder what these folks would do if there was actually any money to be made blogging. I suspect these turned up noses and fence building exercises would erupt into a full fledged range war.

Faux agoraphobia is spreading in parts of the blogosphere. There are lots of proffered explanations as to why. But there’s only one reason.

Human nature. They just won’t admit it.

Seth Godin has a wonderfully satirical post today that provides 56 tips to increase your blog traffic.

Among my favorites:

11. Don’t write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
13. Write about your kids.

10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati.

19. Do email interviews with the well-known.

21. Use photos. Salacious ones are best.

31. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.

37. Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.

15. Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
44. Don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links.

This is good stuff.

The point is that there is no recipe you can follow to ensure a popular blog. All you can do is write hard, try to write well, join in the conversations and wait.

I am a songwriter, and have been for many years. There is a camp within the songwriting community who believe that writing a song is like baking a cake. You put the right ingredients in, mix it up and bake it for the specified length of time and, presto, you’ll have a good song.

Of course when you listen to excellent songs by Bruce Springsteen or Van Morrison or Bob Dylan, you quickly notice that many of their songs ignore many of the so called rules. I’ve had people who claim to be songwriters tell me all the reasons why some of my songs that have been recorded by more that one artist will never get cut. Normally, I just let them go on, without telling them about the cuts, because the purpose of that conversation is for them to talk, not for me to hear. I know that, more times than not, their strict adherence to the songwriting recipe will keep them from the experimentation that can lead to great art.

Recipes are fine for science. Blogs and songs are not science. They are art. And while there are some basic principles you can follow to make better art, good art is what people who see it like.

It’s the same way with blogs.

I’ve been doing a lot of work around the house this holiday weekend. Changing light bulbs, cleaning out the garage, fixing the gate so Lucky Dog can’t poop on the soccer field. That sort of thing.

As I work, I have been thinking a little about the blogosphere. I still enjoy blogging, but I’ve been doing it long enough to see the little flaws and imperfections that I would fix if I could do the same sort of fix-it work in the blogosphere that I’m doing around the house.

Here, in no particular order, are 5 things that would make the blogosphere a better place.

1) If Steve Gillmor and his buddies would be happy just being a part of the crowd and stop trying to separate themselves from the rest of us.

I’ve said all I need to say about Steve‘s attempt to toss up walls around his so-called blog by declaring that he won’t link out to anyone. As I have said before, that merely turns back time by making what was an interactive blog into a 1996 era personal home page, neighborhood newspaper, mini-magazine sort of thing. There’s nothing wrong with that- we all had them back in the day. The problem is that, unfortunately, Steve is associated with blogging and all of these grand plans to recreate the blogosphere into a caste system where he writes and the rest of us read is wholly inconsistent with the conversational nature of the blogosphere- which is what brought most of us to blogging in the first place. It also ignores the indisputable fact that none of us were born with an innate knowledge of Steve’s URL and thus has to get it from, yes, a link (props to OmegaMom for pointing that out via a Comment).

My 8 year old daughter and her friends went through a phase this past school year where they began setting up little secret clubs and then inviting those of their friends who were currently in favor to join. It’s human nature to want to affiliate with others, but this behavior was detrimental to the classroom and so it was rightly discouraged. The same thing should apply in the blogosphere.

Looking down your nose at those who disagree with you and calling them “trolls” is a recipe for the summertime blues. The cure might be to take a long look in the mirror and then embrace the blogosphere that exists instead of trying to recreate it to your advantage.

We should resist any attempt to build walls and work to nurture the flattened earth policy that allows everyone to participate equally – without trying to promote new and unnecessary concepts in the name of personal gain.

2) If old media people and new media people would focus on the commonalities and stop fighting for perceived blog superiority.

This is a battle that can never be won or lost. It just goes on and on. Old media writers have years of training that cannot be cast aside just because they write a blog. New media bloggers have a lot to say and the fact that they don’t have journalism degrees doesn’t make their writing frivolous or pedestrian. If we focus on the common ground, there will be less of a need for Nick Carr et al. to make extreme statements and talk about how dumb the rest of us are merely to generate readers (which is an old media trick that many new media writers also use), and there will be less of a need for new media writers to defend themselves in the face of what they rightly or wrongly believe is a claim of journalistic superiority. We’re simply talking about topics that interest us. If I am a dummy or if you are Hemingway, people will figure that out on their own. We don’t have to keeping trying to convince them.

While I am by no means old media, I have co-written several books and a lot of newspaper articles over the years. I don’t mention it here every time one gets published for the same reason I don’t mention it at dinner- it’s not really relevant and to do so would seem immodest. But the fact that I have written for traditional media doesn’t make traditional media better or worse than blog writing- they are different animals.

Blogs are the offspring of the personal web page and the internet message board. They have little to do with traditional newspaper, other than the fact that some old media has smartly embraced blogging. The fact that the traditional newspaper is in trouble has more to do with Craigslist and eBay and CNN and Yahoo than it does with some blog. Stated another way, while blogs may not be old media-friendly, they are not the biggest enemy of old media.

If we put the differences aside and focus on what we have in common, we can get back to the conversation. It’s always better to learn from each other than to fight with each other. That sounds trite when I read it, but so do a lot of the blogospats that keep popping up in the blogosphere.

3) If Technorati would work the way it’s supposed to and Share Your OPML would be embraced by the masses.

I still use Technorati as my primary method to find new blog content and to listen for cross blog conversation. Sadly, it still seems to suffer from growing pains. At least once or twice a week, I come across links to Newsome.Org via my reading list that never show up in Technorati. Additionally, my link count seems to change only rarely and when it does, it goes up and down like the temperature. I still find Technorati to be incredibly useful, but it would be so much better if it were more reliable.

Dave Winer‘s Share Your OPML (a perfect example of an application that does what it is supposed to do without a bunch of needless fluff) has a ton of potential to supplant Technorati as far as blog rankings go, but in order to do that, it needs to be promoted to and embraced by more and more people. If you haven’t explored Share Your OPML, go take a look. You’ll like it.

We still need a way to track inbound links to specific posts and to search for content. A working Technorati and a widely used Share Your OPML would be a great combination.

4) If people would fight the urge to try to make a quick buck every chance they get.

I wrote about the sportsification of the internet last week, and my sermon about the dangers of greed and avarice on the internet can be found there.

Human nature applies to the blogosphere just like it does to the rest of life. And one thing you can be sure of is that someone will try to make money off of anything that happens. Care must be taken, however, in the context of collaborative creations like the blogosphere to make sure that the first person to break ranks and try to monetize the creation doesn’t succeed in co-opting the work of others for personal gain.

Because just like in the case of Stowe Boyd’s brilliant no-assholes rule, once the first person succeeds in doing so, there will be a mad rush to the bank and chaos will ensue.

Blogs started out as more interactive personal web pages. Soon someone tossed up some ads to help a little with the expenses. Before you know it, someone decided that blogs, in and of themselves, could be a business and the race for the almighty dollar was on.

Making money from blogs is not the problem. But treating the entire blogging experience as a way to make money is like the neighbor who treats every acquaintance as a prospective tupperware or Amway buyer. It’s OK to make money in the right context, but treating all of blogging as a money making endeavor is wrong and destined to failure.

Blogs can be a very effective part of your business (see Steve Rubel for a great example of this), but they cannot be your business. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before the forces that lead to the decline of the traditional newspaper (primarily the fact that people won’t pay to read online content and that there’s nothing other than ads to sell) will find their way to the blog as a business arena.

Now comes CMP Media trying to trademark the slogan “Web 2.0” for conferences purposes. Are you kidding me? First of all, there is evidence that the slogan was used prior to the O’Reilly conferences in question. Secondly, as Cory Doctorow points out, the slogan “Web 2.0” is used by so many people for so many different purposes that, from a trademark perspective, the cat has long since left the bag.

Again, every single thing in our lives does not have to be about money. We need to collectively draw the line around parts of the blogosphere and refuse anyone who tries to hijack our collective efforts for personal gain.

5) If bloggers learned how to listen as well as they talk.

As I have said many times, I am thrilled by the great content I find via my reading list, cross blog conversations and links people email me. The blogosphere allows me to converse with and become friends with people from all over the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and many other places. It’s like a virtual watercooler where we gather once or twice a day to share information and discuss topics of mutual interest.

Part of sharing, however, is listening to what others have to say. Bloggers talk with their posts and listen with their links. Talking comes natural, but it takes work to become a good listener. I have given lip service to being a good listener in the blogosphere, but the truth is that I could be a lot better at it.

Listening is something I am going to work on over the coming weeks and months. We should all work on it, because a watercooler without listeners can turn into a cacophony of noise that drives interesting voices, both old and new, away.

That’s my 5 step program to improve the blogosphere. I’d love to hear yours via Comment or Trackback.

Richard Querin makes an excellent rebuttal to Steve Gillmor’s non-linking mania.

Sadly, all of Richard’s logic and common sense will be for naught, since the whole non-linking business is nothing more than a thinly disguised attempt on the part of Steve and a couple of his pals to separate themselves from the blogging community by declaring that they are blogo-stars and don’t need to be bothered with interacting with the rest of us. The reason Steve writes in indecipherable paragraphs is because if he said it in a way that people could actually understand, he would be laughed out of the room. By using big words and long sentences, he can pretend that if we were smart enough to understand him, we’d all fall in line.

On the last Gillmor Gang podcast I will ever listen to Steve actually said that he goes out of his way not to use significant content and ideas from other bloggers in his posts so he won’t have to link to them.

This cat thinks he’s special. And that’s fine. Go be special, but do it over there where I can’t see you. Because if I can see you, I will feel compelled to try to get you to see things logically and realize that these are blogs were are talking about here- not some secret path to fame and fortune.

Not engaging in the cross blog communication, which occurs via linking, is completely inconsistent with the purpose and beauty of blogging. It’s like turning the web back to 1995 when everyone had their little self-contained Geocities web page. It’s backwards thinking pretending to be forward thinking.

But blogo-stars don’t listen. Listening is for the rest of us.

I used to be amazed at the degree to which Dave Winer would go out of his way to fight with people. As it turns, out Dave is minor league when it comes to fighting. The King of RSS has lost his blog-fighting title to the ZDNet Zinger.

After first deciding that links are no good and then writing some of the most indecipherable words ever put together, Steve Gillmor carps at Richard Querin and gets irritated at his pal Mike Arrington on the latest Gillmor Gang podcast. I got frustrated with Steve’s pissy demeanor after part 1, so I missed all the barbs I expect he flung around in the rest of the podcast.

Steve also managed to make Nick Carr sound like a down to earth, logical and reasonably friendly guy in the process. In fact, I got the impression that more than one of the other gang members were put off by Steve’s demeanor.

Thank goodness Doc Searls is still in the gang to provide a voice of reason to the podcasts.

I think what was initially a fun and interesting free-for-all debate has devolved into a soapbox for Steve to pick fights and act superior, and I find that boring. The spirited debate is what attracted me to that podcast, but lately, as old what’s his name points out, Steve just sounds angry at everybody.

I’m too bored with Steve’s act to even get into the merits of his argument, but I will say that if you make outlandish statements like this whole non-linking business and then get irritated when people react negatively, you are going to be mad a lot.