I’ve probably posted too many times directly about Robert Scoble, but I was thinking today about why I continue to read him. I have sort of a love / hate relationship with Scoble’s blog, because while at times he posts very interesting stuff before other people do, his incessant enthusiasm for his employer (Microsoft) can at times verge on disgusting, and ridiculous.

But the real reason you should read Scoble transcends all of that. Robert is (most of the time) a very mature, responsible member of society, and he’s someone we all could learn from.

Today was the party for friends and family for my son’s second birthday - as well as being a father’s day celebration - hosted at my in-law’s house. During an engaging conversation about racism with my father and two of my brother -in-laws, we suddenly came to complete agreement on a single point: that we need to create more true conversation (expression and discussion of ideas) in the world, and unfortunately most people are just looking to be heard.

I can’t remember where I saw it, but I recently read about a negative aspect of the Walkman / iPod revolution: that we shut into ourselves and only listen to that which we like, over and over again. Eventually we feel empty, or “undernourished”, as we have not been willing to venture outside our comfort zone to expose ourselves to something new. This idea is true in all of our information and media consumption; if we choose only to expose ourselves to things that we like, we become undernourished.

If you were to take a random sample from Scoble’s blog, you might be inclined to think that he’s someone who is just looking to be heard. But you’d be wrong. Scoble reads as many blogs as he can find time for, and makes a point of not just reading blogs that have similar viewpoints to his; he goes out of his way to read ideas that run contrary to his own. And this is his saving grace. Blogs as a communication medium are revolutionary, but only when we use them thoughtfully and responsibly. Robert teaches us to do that.

Link: The Scobleizer

Ed Bott points to an incredible list of keyboard shortcuts for Windows and other Microsoft software like any version of Office, IE, Media Player and others.

This is brilliant.

ClearContext, a company I’ve written about many times in the past, appears to have very interesting funding. Brad Meador, head of operations, and Deva Hazarika, the chief executive officer, spend their free time playing (and obviously winning at) online poker, and this is how they keep the lights on.

Information, or in this case “the information superhighway” is power.

My brother-in-law invented this concept at least three years ago, maybe more (so he would have been about 15). In his case, it was an alarm clock that would track your sleep cycles by recording your brain waves, and wake you at the most opportune time.

The Sleeptracker watch is #1 on my list of most wanted gadgets that I can’t afford right now. I wish I had a birthday or something coming up; I’d get all of my family to go in on it together. February’s not that far away, is it?

It took me a while to warm to del.ico.us as my link tracking method of choice. My overwhelming Bookmarks library was so huge that I finally decided to try a method that gives more information about the links I saved, where I would be more likely to be able to figure out what I needed at a later date. Plus, although posting a link to del.ico.us is extremely easy, it’s not quite as easy as bookmarking a page, making me think twice about bookmarking anything and everything.

But the one thing that cheeses me about del.ico.us is that it’s too damn popular; sometimes it can take forever for the page to load. Foxylicious is a Firefox extension that fixes that! Simply install Foxylicious, give it your del.ico.us username and password, and tell it where to store your del.ico.us links in your bookmarks hierarchy. (Hint, don’t choose the root folder, unless you don’t mind losing everything, including your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder.) That’s it! Oh, and make sure to set it to sync daily.

I found this little gem through a great AppRocket tutorial linked to by LifeHacker.

AppRocket is a simple yet addictive little utility that can speed up your navigation of your Windows PC. If you are keyboard-centric, and hate to wait, AppRocket is worth a look.

Ed Bott very accurately explains what the Windows XP Prefetch folder is all about, and more importantly what it’s not. Most Power Users know that they should be occasionally purging their Prefetch folder under the Windows system folder. But what they “know” is wrong; Ed explains.