Back in March, popular blogger and technical evangelist Robert Scoble announced that he was leaving Fast Company. Now he works at Rackspace and is building what is being called a “community for people fanatical about the Internet.” This is called Building43.
In a post on his Scobleizer blog, Robert says, “Building43 a Web site. It’s a T-shirt. It’s a Twitter account. It is a video channel on Blip.tv. It’s a friendfeed group. It’s a sticker. It’s a team. It’s a Facebook Page. It’s a database (or really a few of them). And more.”
Everybody will get to find out what it really is at 5pm PT today, when the site is scheduled to go live at Building43.com. Technically, you might be able to get a better feel for it starting an hour before that if you go to this Kyte.tv channel, where Scoble and company will be streaming live from Palo Alto.
What you find upon launch will not begin to cover what you can expect from Building43 by the sound of it. “It is just the start,” explains Scoble. “To the trained eye it looks like a WordPress blog and a friendfeed group (and soon a Facebook page and a Twitter account). But we just needed to ship. And ship fast without a dedicated technology team.”
“…the promise of Building43 is bigger than just being a WordPress blog with a friendfeed group or a Facebook page. The promise is we can help other people and businesses get excited about the Web we love,” he adds.
Early on in Building43’s existence, users can expect to see interviews with Four Seasons, Zappos, Facebook, and Google. They’ve got a number of interviews in the pipes already, and surely there will be many, many more in the future. Scoble says that you can expect at least a couple a week at first, but eventually they will try to do one a day.
People can submit videos, blogs, and more to Building43. They can tag other people’s videos with “building43” on YouTube, include the #building43 hashtag in Tweets etc. Scoble gives more details in his announcement, and certainly more will emerge as the community goes live.
Anything like this that Scoble is involved with is sure to draw plenty of followers and interest from the technology industry. It’s going to be interesting to see just how big Building43 becomes.
