Scoble is taking some blowback over his "what's a blog" post. It wasn't clear from that post, but what he's really after are the influencers - and the private or semi-private sites don't count in that particular calculation:

I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at MSN’s OWN ADVERTISING CONFERENCE told me. An influencer is worth THOUSANDS of times more than a non-influencer (influencer is someone who tells other people stuff, which is why blogging is getting so much advertising attention lately). That’s why Google is charging more per click than MSN is (Google has more influential users). That’s why Federated Media is closing advertising deals left and right.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote on this topic years ago in "The Tipping Point". What the advertisers want are the influencers (for obvious reasons). Doing a group buy across MySpace (or Spaces, or something else like those services) works, but it's inefficient.

To a very large extent, I think Robert and his critics are talking past each other.

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