Robert Scoble's been catching a lot of flak lately. OK, he's an opinionated guy so obviously he'll rile some people but that's why we read his blog. His opinions and links are worth reading ... sometimes. I don't think there's any blogger out there who I'd say is interesting all of the time, even the often hilarious Rory Blyth.

It's getting pretty hard to pick and choose what to read these days. I had a list of about 100 blogs I was reading and found after about a month it was just too much to digest. Now I just wait until someone else links to interesting posts. I might be missing around half of the good stuff, but I'll trade that for my sanity thank you very much. So that's the function that Robert Scoble's blog is serving for me: he's a Microsoft human aggregator.

I have half a brain -- sometimes two halves. I know he's going to be biased and I want that spin. I get enough anti-spin on Slashdot to counter it 10 times over. When I'm curious about what's going on at Microsoft I want to read it from a human being, not a press release.

But lately Scoble's been doing a lot of rear-view mirror watching. He thinks that linking to people that insult/disagree with him will make things better. I don't know about that -- it doesn't take much to write a disagreeing blog post these days. Maybe if they had a good point and it got Scoble reflecting about something and he blogged about it, it would be worth the link back. Otherwise he's just linking to trolls.

He also thinks that linking to competing products and companies will make things better. I disagree there too. Unless he has something better to say than "see? I'm linking to them too" it's not really worth the time to write it and it's definitely not worth the time to read it.

I pick on Scoble because he's one of the few bloggers who's getting a lot of attention AND he works for a software company with a bulls-eye on it the size of Redmond, Washington (I hear it's the only thing you can see from space other than the Great Wall). It's an interesting push and pull of opinions and politics that make for interesting blog reading. It's like watching a guy try to cross the Niagara Falls on a high wire ... on his hands. So it's kind of a shame to see him giving into his readers so much. Feedback is good but ultimately Robert has to stick to his guns and say "I like Microsoft people and products and damn the man if people complain about it."

Overall I think that Scoble's readers have to grow up. They have to realise what they are reading and why they are reading it. Scoble is not a local newspaper and he doesn't owe you anything. You're perfectly free to have an opinion on it, of course, but If you don't like his blog why waste your time complaining about it? Go read something else. You're screwing up a perfectly good thing for the rest of us. :)