Cariann Higginbotham: Technology Evangelist Podcast, Episode – 0010, for January 24^th, 2007. Technology Evangelist welcomes Robert Cringely.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Welcome to Technology Evangelist Podcast, my name is Benjamin Higginbotham. With me as usual is Ed Kohler.

Ed Kohler: Hello.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And new friend of our’s, Robert Cringely.

Robert X. Cringely: Hello boys.

Benjamin Higginbotham: How are you doing?

Robert X. Cringely: I am fine, can you hear me. Can you hear me now? Good.

Ed Kohler: You sound great Bob.

Robert X. Cringely: Thank you.

Ed Kohler: So, Bob welcome to the team.

Robert X. Cringely: I am a member of the team, though I notice on my skype thing here that my head is much smaller than either of yours.

Ed kohler: Well that’s something you guys have to fix when you get a chance.

Robert X. Cringely: I’ve always a long had a problem with the little head. Oh, boy is that’s just downhill from here. yes.

Benjamin Higginbotham: We are gonna have to mark this one as an explicit night.

Robert X. Cringely: Oh, really? Alright.

Ed Kohler: So, Bob tell us a little about the history of how you got to know Technology Evangelist, because you actually got to know us before, I got to know us I think?

Robert X. Cringely: I think I got to know you before you existed or before it existed. I met Roald Marth and Elizabeth Chesen, the founders of wheretolive.com before there was a wheretolive.com at some conference some place where for insulted Microsoft and never was invited back again and they were in awe of my willingness to sacrifice my carrier for a joke and we hit it off and just remained in contact and they had always wanted to do something together. When WhereToLive was founded, I came to a couple of meetings and spoke in event and that was about that. Finally, I started doing a NerdTV and they saw this as a chance to co-operate, because they wanted to do Innovating Media which is, I guess the basis for all of these Technology Evangelist and other podcast/broadcasts and all video recordings, whatever the heck it is that we are doing. So, we came together over the last year or so and the second season of “Super Nerds”, our first NerdTV show was produced in association with Innovating Media and Technology Evangelist. Now suddenly, I find myself doing a little blogging here, because in my other gig is only allows me to fill-in big holes with large shovels full of dirt, and you have little holes and little potting shovel that I really rather like. So, I am enjoying writing about STUFF.

Ed Kohler: Well, we do appreciate your help filling those little holes. I guess that might be spackling or something compared to, what you were doing before, but we really like that…

Robert X. Cringely: Well it's "holy" work.

Ed Kohler: Yeah, so you are a bit of an expert, when it comes to nerds? What you can tell us about that? What is a nerd?

Robert X. Cringely: A nerd is someone who cares more about technology than about what they are eating. That doesn’t mean that they stop eating, that just means that they don’t notice it as they are shoveling it in, in vast quantities, but they really-really care immensely about technology and its effect on their life and tangentially, it’s effect on the world. So, Nerds are tend to be inward looking people who are very smart and have a lot to say, but somehow don’t say it often, because they think faster or slower than the rest of us, and are a  little out of sinc, I believe that’s the reason why nerds are very often ostracized or used to be ostracized in our culture until they made all the money and now they get the chicks.

 Ed Kohler: So, would you say that you are the largest nerd rolodex, in the world?

Robert X. Cringely: No, I don’t think I do. I have the story I always told is that I have 3,309 entries in my rolodex but that was actually when the last time I counted  them was probably 10 years ago I probably have 15,000 now, so I know a lot of people and they know me and we have an active communication that goes on - has gone on for years, years, years and  and the key to this is actually longevity. , it’s like quantity not quality. It’s just being there and listening to bad ideas for decades, means that you're built into their system and when they have something to say, they say it to you or to me in this case. So, that’s why I have a career. .

Ed Kohler:  For the tech sector, you having been spent sometime on the road with you, you are not the most techie guy out there although, you have a good microphone at your house , you know how to use a Skype, but you have a kind of not top of line cell phone, how does that work?

Robert X. Cringely: I am not so much into STUFF, I like the ideas and I like the potential more than the realization. I certainly hate the trouble shooting and inevitable fixing of every thing. So, I take a sort of a higher level view of technology which gets me grudging respect when I am able to put together the big picture, but when it comes time to actually make it work, you know they roll their eyes and they say “Hmmm”, Cringely he can’t do it, what good is he? So, yeah, it’s true. I am basically incompetent I am sorry, but cute.

Ed Kohler: So, it doesn’t affect your status, necessarily?

Robert X. Cringely: It will only affect my status, if I allowed it to. If the thing that is incredibly important in the tech community, the nerd community is to not take anything personally, because I have had people contact me everyday for the last 20 years, telling me that I am useless piece of shit. If I believe them, I would have committed suicide long ago. But, instead I think well that’s an interesting to say, do we have anything we could actually talk about and often we do. When they some of the best relationships I have in technical area come from people who originally attacked me and then discovered I was a human being and we have been in contact ever since. There are nerds who contact me everyday for 15 years and I look forward to it, it’s weird, but I do.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But, don’t the nerds usually take stuff like that personally?

Robert X. Cringely: Yeah, they do. I think they come in to it. You know they feel things very strongly, if I make a mistake, it’s like you clip the blue wire or the red wire and I think well, cut the blue wire and they say oh, that’s gonna destroy life as we know it, you do not deserve to live, get out off, go away and if I accepted that at that moment, then we never have connection again, but since I don’t. We keep in touch with each other, we get past that moment and suddenly they find themselves communicating, which they often don’t do successfully with other people in their lives. Might be it’s just my tolerance for pain is higher, but I enjoy those communications and learning more about people. So, I do that and then on the basis of that STUFF dribbles in. Some guy says “oh have you met this guy or do you know about that technology” and I end-up writing about things, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years even before most of the rest of the world even notices.

Ed Kohler: How do you measure the success of a column? Is there something particular like I was looking through digg.com to see what’s your column have really got some traction there and your most recent one about Google that one really took off but it kind of varies from column to column, but I don’t know if that’s something you look at or is it based on your feedback you get or?

Robert X. Cringely: No, as a matter of fact I avoid it completely, I never look at anything, because if I did that then I would be chasing ratings . Then I would be deliberately writing columns so that people who digg it or whatever those other things are that they do. I am a relative new comer to this blogging thing. I was doing something like a blog for years and years before anyone else was, but I am only lately adopting the technology. But, whether it’s a column or a blog entry, I long ago figured out that it was to my advantage not to worry about whether anyone was reading. It was much better to just do what I thought was proper and eventually, you are out there shouting on your soapbox for a while and people kind of figure that you are gonna keep doing it and then they start to listen and people find you in there as I said. The whole thing is longevity. . It’s not that you have to be right all the time, it’s that you have to be right enough and do it long enough and then you become part of the firmament and when that happens, you are there forever. So, I have lifetime employment as far as I can figure out.

Ed Kohler:  Longevity only gets longer.

Robert X. Cringely: Well, ultimately you die, but I exist, I have enough words out there that I could stop writing and people might not notice.

Ed Kohler: I was feeling people are heading refresh pretty often on Fridays waiting for your column to go live, but…

Robert X. Cringely: Me too.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So out of curiosity, why did it take so long to move into the actual blogging software itself, why were you just doing the traditional column format?

Robert X. Cringely: Well, because I wasn’t demanding a change. For the most part had and continue to have little respect for blogging, which I see is like, I mean the way it came about, tended to be I read this and it’s interesting and I read that and interesting in this guy says that and that guy says this and here are bunch of links and isn't that exciting, then I’ve written a paragraph, I am done. I came from a tradition of writing hundreds or thousands of words that were actually are together and coherent essay and have a beginning, middle and an end and a call to action and there we are sometimes make some jokes and that requires so much more rigor . You know people say “oh you only write one of those a week, what’s wrong with you?” Well I work hard you know I wanted to be good, rather than I dash this thing off and it has bad spelling and bad grammar and no one really ought to care about this. That’s the way that I tended to view it, I was pushed into the blogging technology by the fact that there is a support system, a support infrastructure of technology that all that diggs and the del.icio.us' and that sort of stuff, that guides readers to blogs and had I continued as just as static column, I would have not had as many readers as I have and that I said that I didn’t want to seek readers, but the same time I am not stupid. In my PBS column is working for a network that would really like to have more readers and so that was their idea to do the blogging stuff and I just said okay and now we're doing it and I am doing it here too.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I assume that worked well for you then?

Robert X. Cringely: Well we we've only doing it for couple of months now, but yeah as a matter of fact I am understanding, keep telling me things that I don’t want to here, but I understand we are up like 30%-40%. So, it’s a sort of amazing because is not that the columns are better or its not even that the columns are different. I am writing basically the same thing it just is a part of a different infrastructure that helps guide readers to it.

Ed Kohler: Well it seems like you get to be told that you are full of shit in public more before it was probably more by e-mail.

Robert X. Cringely: Yeah, the responses. In fact that’s an interesting thing, I was reading this evening the blog of Michael Miller, who was for a long-long time was the editor in chief of PC Magazine and he continued, he is no longer in that role , but he continues to have a blog on the PC Magazine website and he writes lots of stuff and there he is writing this and he is writing that and about all this.. . This guy is I guess pretty well known fellow, I have certainly known him for 20 years and I noticed after he does these entries, there is like no comments or there is one comment, the biggest one was two comments. So, I do this thing and I get like 600 comments and 600 comments is almost is a problem in itself because 600 comments is too many to deal with. You have to find a way that sort of thread the comments or nest them or expand them or contact them or something, so that people aren’t, because people tend to ask the same question over and over again, why didn’t you know that Google has a data center in Oregon or they ask the question about this or about that and it happens over and over again. And it because they don't read down far enough or the people who do read down far enough, see the reputation and get pissed off by it and they say “don’t you people understand”, So a third to a half of your entries tend to be, ah, meaningless. On the other hand, clearly, if you have six hundred to a thousand comments associated with a blog entry, someone must be reading them and reading them and caring enough about them. So, I feel sorry for Michael Miller and so if this whole commenting business, I am kind of new to. Its kind of thrilling, because it does show that people do care and I guess the number of comments you get , it shows the level of passion that your readers have for the topic or how much they either love or hate you, which are variations of the same thing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what drives you? Where does your passion come from?

Ed Kohler: Technically…

Robert X. Cringely: Well, now we're back to the big head/little head thing .

Benjamin Higginbotham: We have already marked this one of the explicit , so go ahead, you can do whatever you want to do.

Robert X. Cringely: Oh okay, you know I'll tell you, where does my passion come from? I haven’t the slightest idea and yet it does. Basically, I don’t have a life, but what, well  you guys should know, you don’t have lives either and we care about this STUFF and the STUFF we care about, we care about a lot. We are different I think in that, Ben seems to be very fixated on gadgets and hardware and gizmos and how it functions in the world.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Just a little.

Robert X. Cringely: Just a little bit and whereas Ed has embraced this whole blogosphere, web search engine optimization. Its all about the system and how the system works and I take a completely different approach and that is I think I tend to look at it from the industry’s standpoint and try to figure out, who is trying to put their hand in my wallet and steal all my money. So, you put the three together and you actually get a pretty good view of this thing. So, I think we compliment each other very well. Don’t you?

Ed Kohler: I don’t think we are gonna step on each others toes anytime soon?

Robert X. Cringely: Well I don’t have toes. Don’t take any thing personally remember there is no toe stepping,

Ed Kohler:- Good point.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I am not sure if its a bad thing, you are talking about how you never looked at digg. When you started writing for TE, I decided to actually compare our digg count to each other, just because that you know I am a competitive person and you beat me, by a lot.

Robert X. Cringely: Who beat?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Robert you beat me by a lot.

Robert X. Cringely: Oh, I have been doing it longer I guess.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Yes, but I wanted to inflate my ego’s somehow?

Robert X. Cringely: I have more enemies.

Benjamin Higginbotham: No…

Ed Kohler: That is the side longevity right there.

Robert X. Cringely: Well I actually I should point out something. On Sunday I will be 54 years old and you guys aren’t, so I will be dead and you are still doing this.

Ed Kohler:- Well, I think this that really good chance to get to know each other a bit here and I think we'll have some fun adding to the blog, and get some great content out there.

Robert X. Cringely: Okay so now let’s turn on jets on the hot tub and get back to it.

Ed Kohler: Keep the power away from the hot tub.

Benjamin Higginbotham: For anyone who is listening, this is how it's always like with Bob. Whenever we travel with him it's just a constant strain of one liners and you can’t help laugh the whole time, its so much fun.

Ed Kohler: Hope that humor comes out in the columns.

Robert X. Cringely: Oh Lord, I hope so too.

Robert X. Cringely: Ok guys…Thank you very much.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Take care, you have a great night.