scoble: personal or corporate blog?

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Update: Scoble responds to this analysis. Thanks Robert for the response. Also, Scoble is the Chief Technology Evangelist at Microsoft, in case you didn’t know.

More Update: I wrote a follow up to this post here. I changed my mind — I think Scoble was a PR Microsoft Guy all along. What was I thinking? Well, he responds to the update here.

+++++

In May 2006, Robert Scoble shares his honest story about the death of his mother: It is open, sincere, and engaging. Many people responded with heartfelt condolences and warmth. In my opinion, if there ever were an example of community, of rallying around and for somebody, Scoble’s post on his mom certainly fits the bill. In response to that post, the Orcology Blog poses a relevant question: is Scoble’s blog a Microsoft Blog or isn’t it? It’s difficult to tell.

Robert Scoble responds to the Orcology Blog and explains why he blogs and that he doesn’t do it for the money and that there isn’t a business model for his blog. In his words,

Why do it then? Because audiences improve everything they touch. Our book is better because we showed it to you before we published it. My videos on Channel 9 are better because you’re able to add your two cents onto the subject (or ask a question I forgot to ask). My friendships are better cause everyone in the world gets to see what I’m thinking and going through and we don’t need to cover that stuff when we get together. Even my relationship with my wife is better. If I forget to take out the trash all she has to do is tell you and then I’ll get heck about it from everyone. It’s funny the personal feedback I get on all these topics.

This is a good explanation and I buy it. I am a fan of Scoble and I enjoy his content. After more thought on this and the Orcology blog’s question, I wonder if there is a more quantitative way we can find out what blogs talk about.

I recently started learning Ruby. I love Python and Perl, and I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby because of the cool things I’ve heard about it. So, I began my journey with Ruby. The first thing I wanted to do was to run some Ruby scripts based on some computational linguistic concepts I learned while I was in graduate school. My test problem? — Scoble’s Blog.

I want to know how often he talks about Microsoft. His blog is his personal blog and has a wide range of topics, or it seems that way. I wonder how varied his topics are. If we show that x% of his posts has the word “m[M]icrosoft” in it, it doesn’t prove that he’s not genuine. We can, however conclude, based on data, that he talks about “microsoft” x% of the time.

So, using Ruby, I did the following:

1. read in Scoble’s Feed URL.
2. Parse it
3. How many post are there?
4. How many post have the word “m[M]icrosoft”?

Pretty simple. Below is the Ruby Code (indentation convention was lost due to blockqoute):

# @author: Pete Abilla
# @date: 7, June, 2006
# @function: crawls hard-coded feed url and
# computes basic linguistic statistics on given word
# in posts.

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘feed_tools’
feed = FeedTools::Feed.open
(‘http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/feed/’)
keyword = ‘microsoft’
total_occurances = 0
total_posts = 0

keyword_pattern = Regexp.new(keyword, Regexp::IGNORECASE)
feed.entries.each do |entry|
puts “Entry: #{entry.title}”
matches = entry.content.scan(keyword_pattern)
if matches != nil
puts “Occurances of ‘#{keyword}’: #{matches.size}”
total_occurances += matches.size
total_posts += 1 if matches.size > 0
end
end
puts “Total number of posts in feed: #{feed.entries.size}”
puts “Total occurances of ‘#{keyword}’: #{total_occurances}”
puts “Total number of posts in which ‘#{keyword}’ appeared: #{total_posts}”

Results?

* Note: My program, for some reason, only grabs the most recent 50 Posts. I’d love to grab all Posts and use that as my data set. In the absence of more data, I have to use the 50 Posts that I can grab and analyze. Yes, it’s a small data set, but it is still representative of the whole, but with a greater error band and not a narrower one that I’d prefer. In the future, what I could do is to store the feed in my local MySQL DB and run analysis off of that datastore.

We see, based on a small sample of 50 posts, that the word “m[M]icrosoft” appears in 27 posts, or based on a sample size of 50 posts, 54% of Robert Scoble’s posts contain the word “microsoft.”

What can we conclude from this? Scoble enjoys Microsoft and talks about it over half the time. But, he also talks about other things, half the time. To the question of whether or not Robert Scoble’s blog is a Microsoft blog, the data allows us to conclude that it is a Microsoft Blog 1/2 of the time.

Where does this bring us? Well, I’m still going to read Scoble’s blog — I enjoy it and it’s content is relevant to me and, I personally believe that he is genuine.

This is what I think is happening: the lines between personal and work is very blurred. Much of a person’s identity is wrapped-up in their work. So, when we see Scoble blogging about non-microsoft things 1/2 the time and about Microsoft the other 1/2, then I think we’re observing somebody who identifies Microsoft as a part of who they are. I don’t think this is bad; it is something to be aware of and certainly something we shouldn’t judge. I’m still going to read Scoble’s Blog. I enjoy it. I just now need to be aware that, on average, he’ll talk about Microsoft 50% of the time. Those odds aren’t bad for good content, 1/2 of the time.

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