I’ve been watching the news buzzing around the blogosphere of Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft to go to PodTech with fascination for the last few days. I’m not fascinated by it really for the news itself (although it’ll be interesting to see how Robert approaches the new roll and whether it pays off for PodTech) but am intrigued by a couple of other things:
My second interest in the story is that Robert’s story is a great example of a blogger with opportunities opening up as a result of his blog. I often draw the distinction between bloggers who make money directly from their blogs and bloggers who make money because of their blogs but have found it much harder to find prominent examples of the second type than the first. This is a prime example of someone who over time has built a profile to the point where he’s an attractive target for an upcoming start up. The publicity that the story of Robert swapping jobs is probably worth what ever PodTech are paying him alone (let alone whatever he’ll do when he actually goes over to them).
Another Example
Speaking of bloggers making money BECAUSE of their blogs – another blogger looks like he’s doing similar things. Valleywag has broken a story today of Om Malik from GigaOm pulling back on his position at Business 2.0 from being a ‘senior writer’ to a ‘contributing editor’. The reason is that he’s apparently received funding to take GigaOm to the next level and make it a business in and of itself.
Om runs ads on his blog at present (and therefore is making money from his blog) but I suspect that the business he’ll develop will take him into the second category of bloggers also. It’ll be an interesting development to watch.
Update: Om has posted about the news on his blog now and explains his reasons so it’s all official.
