Okay, so I’m no Marshall McLuhan with my spoof headline there, but I can back that up with a few stories of shake-ups that have happened recently involving A-list bloggers. And all of this happened last week, I’ve just been too busy to comment yet, so don’t be too hard on me.

For those of you who don’t already know, Robert Scoble was an employee at Microsoft who started blogging about working at his company. Then he got famous. Really famous. And then thousands of Microsoft employees joined suit, and now the software giants have an army of volunteer evangelists and in-house critics.

In another story: Tara Hunt was a blogger from Toronto who was beckoned to the Silicon Valley to manage the marketing of the launch of Riya, a face-recognition-photo-software-program-turned-image-search-engine.

Anyway, as Paul Fabretti points out, now both are out on their own, sans day-job, starting new projects and aligning themselves with new opportunities. In these situations, you never get all of the details of the story, so it’s hard to say what caused these personnel changes, even when you hear the story right from the HorsePigCow’s mouth. I think that both Robert and Tara simply outgrew their surroundings (What? Scoble got too big and powerful for Microsoft!?) and became their own brand, simply by being themselves. Both claim an amicable split, and both are likely to end up coming out ahead when the dust settles.

Robert Scoble had the benefit of association with the hugest company on the planet, while Tara had some great ideas she thought might work, and a knack for networking. Both published great content, and their audiences grew like crazy. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record about this, but this sends a pretty clear message to me: People will connect with you, and with your company if you offer them some value in the form of content, and just be willing to have a conversation with them. In the case of Robert and Tara, they gained a following both for themselves and the companies they were plugging (and often times critiquing). If you’re smart about it and put the time in, it can work for you, too. Yes, it;s a bit of work, but if you’re talking about something you’re passionate about, it becomes more of a hobby than anything. Think of it as free PR, if that makes you feel better.

What’s the secret? Be yourself, tell the truth and have a bit of fun in the process.

Due to my long absences from posting (client work!!), here’s a few bonus links: With all this talk of Microsoft, I forgot to mention that Bill Gates is retiring from his daily duties at Microsoft! Paul Fabretti mentions that in his post too, if you were reading carefully. Bill’s gonna take a load off, and work on his charity instead. He’ll be scaled back to a normal human’s pace of work by 2008, he says.

Also over a week old, but certainly worth the wait: Our esteemed designer and photographer Rob Masefield is on an Eastern Canadian backpacking tour, and has blogged some of his favorite shots from his trip thus far. Stunning work, but really makes me wish I’d seen as much of my country as he has. I promise to link to his next set from the rest of his trip.

Just a note on site stats: Ever since we switched to having the blog built in to the site, the blog home page and individual posts are now overwhelmingly the most popular pages at telltenfriends.com.

That means that now, if I want to know how many people are reading about services, etc. I have to dig a little deeper, because none of the pages on the main site are in the top 5 of my site stats anymore.

This tells me two things.

1. People are more interested in what I have to say than what my site is selling. This is hardly shocking, and is certainly not bad news to me. In fact, it only reinforces what I (and many others) have been saying all along.

2. If you build it, people will come. Okay, that IS a straight rip-off of Field of Dreams, which was originally written by one of the great authors of our time, W.P. Kinsella, who’s from right here in BC. (I’m a fan. Let’s move on, shall we?)What I mean by that is that if you publish relevant, personal, valuable and up-to-date content, traffic will come. The best way to do that is to build a darn blog.

I’m a copywriter and conversion specialist. I sweat over tiny details: keywords, conversion rates, punctuation, and a whole lot of other subtle nuances that factor into a site’s effectiveness. And it turns out that when I’m just me being me, sharing my views and insights on things that may or not be related to marketing, that’s where the traffic comes from.

I realize that this is skewed, since many of you come back time and time again just to see what’s new. But isn’t that the point? I’ve been a “blogger” for less than a year, and I’m thrilled that people read this stuff at all. In fact, I’m floored by the consistency and steady incline in the number of visitors and subscribers. (Side note: The switch from Blogger resulted in a big jump in the number of subscribers to the feedburner feed!) Yes, I read my stats. All of them. It gives me a better idea each day of what people respond to, and subsequently helps me when it comes to doing the same for my clients.

Bonus link:: One of my mentors, Scott Armstrong has just started his own blog, giving advice to young entrepreneurs. Scott is the author of the Start Me Up! Business Guidebook for the young at young at heart, and started his blog on my advice. It was a fair trade, since I’ve been benefitting from his advice for months.

The book is intended for students that are looking to answer the call of entrepreneurship (Instead of wating until they’re all grown, like I did). If you have youngsters that may want to subscribe to his blog, fear not; a feedburneer feed and other publicizing features will be added to his site soon.

In the Vancouver Province newspaper on Sunday, there was a story about a guy who auctioned off his support for a World Cup team on eBay. For $15 hard-earned dollars, a group of his co-workers bought his support, for their beloved Serbia (and Montenegro).

Over at Adcouver, Ryan explains in a very meaningful and heart-felt post why he’s a South Korea fan. If you’ve already seen pictures of my wife and I, then you might be able to guess why I too am a Korea fan. Ryan’s experience was a unique one, being a tall, white foreigner caught up in one of the most powerful moments of national pride and unity that we may see in our lifetimes. While he was partying it up on the streets of Seoul, I was in Victoria, falling in love with all things Korean; their underdog-made-good-team-of-heroes soccer team, and of course the woman who would soon become my wife.

(image: Me in my “Be The Reds!” t-shirt my brother-in-law brought me from Korea)

To get an idea what things were like over here for me while he was there, trade the millions of fans in the streets for smaller, equally patriotic and exuberant groups of Korean fans partying in the streets of sleepy Victoria, BC. Add to that the massive swell of “bandwagon jumpers” (like myself) who watched closely while Korea became the new darlings of the sport; as famous for their teamwork and fast feet as for the massive seas of red shirts in the stands at every game.

This time the games are being played in Germany. If you were lucky enough to catch Korea’s 2-1 win over Togo yesterday, then you already know that geography is of little consequence; the Red Devils are still out in full force, outnumbering alternatively colored shirts (Togo fans?) by more than two-to-one, and they never stop chanting and cheering.

Ryan and I may not look at all like them, but we too want to see Korea advance to the semi-finals again this year. Who knows, maybe this time they’ll surprise us again, and go on another storied run.

OOOOOOOOOH PIL-SIN KO-RE-AAAA!!!