The joy on her face
I met Cali Lewis yesterday. Don't know her? I didn't either, but her story tells you a lot about why I am jumping into Podcasting and Videoblogging and Second Life with both feet. — She started her videoblog in December (she does the Geekbrief videoblog).
Context & Ripple Effects
This short post lands at the loudest moment of Robert Scoble's blogging career: on the same date, TechCrunch, Scripting News, Chris Pirillo, gapingvoid and ZDNet's Between the Lines all carried the news that he was leaving Microsoft for PodTech.net, and this meeting with Cali Lewis reads as the human rationale behind that jump — her joy is why he says he is going into podcasting, videoblogging and Second Life 'with both feet.'
The person he holds up as proof is no veteran: Cali Lewis started the Geekbrief videoblog in December 2005, barely six months before this encounter. Analyst attention on online video was already building earlier that year — Om Malik's February post on Dabble was part of the same run-up — so Scoble citing a half-year-old show as his model is a signal about how low the barrier to credible video publishing had become.
First-order effects
- Scoble's audience and attention now flow through his own channels rather than Microsoft's — his blog, podcasts and planned video work become the product, with PodTech.net (per the syndicated headlines) attached to his name.
- Geekbrief and Cali Lewis get a high-profile endorsement from tech blogging's biggest voice at the moment his departure is dominating the trade press.
Second-order effects
- Podcasting and video startups competing for talent now have a template: personality-driven independents can outrank corporate channels, so networks must recruit named individuals rather than just build shows.
- Corporate communications teams lose their most-cited example of blogging done inside a company, forcing firms that relied on Scoble-style voices to cultivate or contract replacements.
Third-order effects
- If a six-month-old videoblog can validate a career pivot by the field's best-known blogger, media authority in tech is migrating from institutions to individuals who own their distribution.
- Videoblogging stops being a hobby category and starts functioning as a career path — the Lewis pattern of small-show-then-opportunity is what a whole class of creators will follow.
The trend: Technology influence is shifting from corporate-hosted blogs to independently owned video and podcast brands, with personalities like Scoble and Lewis as the early proof cases.