It must not have spelled it in English, though. This week, PodTech sold to ViewPartner, a company that doesn’t even seem to have a website, for under $500,000, or enough to purchase a one-bedroom condo in San Francisco.

Robert Scoble

How does that happen? you want to know. Everybody wants to know, which is why this FriendFeed thread has been highly viewed. Scoble’s been on hand giving lots of nonspecific insight as the rest await former PodTech CEO John Furrier to blog his side of things. One thing’s clear from Scoble’s posting: he definitely thinks it’s the leadership’s fault.

But that’s an easy bet, right?

There had been definite signs of trouble for PodTech over the past year. Transparency has its benefits, but sometimes that window into the company is actually a hole in a leaky boat. Besides few people being really clear about what, exactly, PodTech was about—video, it appears, long form, and technology, and Scoble’s there, making videos too long to watch right now. . .—a strange tweet in the steam of August 2007 rang alarm bells loud enough to be temporarily noticeable.

It could be, the blogosphere took it the wrong way. Chuck Olsen’s now blogospherically infamous tweet read this way:

Just got off the phone with Furrier – it’s a shitbag salad over there… Scoble’s out

For a solid weekend, bloggers dined on that, erm, shitbag salad, digesting it as Scoble’s termination or resignation, both of which he denied, before taking a small blogging hiatus. Then Furrier was forced out by the board, Scoble really did leave four months later, and so had everybody else anybody’d ever heard of.

Eventually, you just stopped hearing of PodTech altogether. That salad Olsen mentioned now appears to have had more ingredients than Furrier and Scoble. According to Scoble, there were lots of problems, including revenue, collective vision, and utilizing talent.

Scoble, from FriendFeed:

". . .almost all of the talent left. What’s left now is not much that’s worth much. The revenues came because of our social media leadership. That’s what Furrier really had in his hands. Owyang. Me. Cunningham. Jones. Gillmor. The rest of the stuff was a pipe dream that didn’t lead anywhere, which is really why the company burned through $7 million (plus several million in revenues)."

Other revealing comments suggest Scoble didn’t see eye-to-eye with (other) leadership, perhaps even with Furrier, though he refuses to give specifics and burn his bridges (probably a smart move). In a nutshell, he advised any startup-minded person watching this saga to have certain ducks in a row (paraphrased below), we’ll call them the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Startups:

1. Revenue is pretty important. (For any old-schooler, that might seem obvious, but success stories like YouTube and Facebook have belied this age-old business tenet.)
2. The ones who bring in the money, should be the ones in charge.
3. Have a vision. Make sure everybody in the company shares that vision.
4. When it comes to firing idiots, there’s no time like the present.
5. You need good metrics/measurements to improve.
6. Listen to your star players.
7. Don’t fire a CEO without having a good replacement.

Furrier weighed in on the FriendFeed thread with a promise to blog more about what exactly happened with PodTech, and also took the time to note Scoble’s assessment may not match his own.

"There are many lessons," said Furrier. "Scoble’s view is from his perspective but there is a big picture that goes way beyond Scoble’s view and that has to do with building a company from a zero stage. I’ve moved on from a year ago after I was forced out by the board. We made some mistakes but directionally correct. Sure if I had a mulligan things might be different but a business strategy, financing strategy, and team strategy are part of the story."

And now, we wait to find out more. Sometimes there are better lessons in failure than in success.

Is Scoble Over Blogging?

So a bit of a fiasco developed while the rest of us were ignoring the blogosphere over the weekend (why is it these little blow-ups always seem to happen then?). Valleywag, like most gossip outlets, has a lot of time on its hands to follow the Twitterings of the A-listers.

So when vlogger Chuck Olsen Twittered this phrase:

Just got off the phone with Furrier – it’s a shitbag salad over there… Scoble’s out

the, um, salad hit the fan. (Congratulations to Olsen for coining a new swear phrase.)

Furrier is John Furrier, who heads up PodTech.net, where Scoble is the main event.

Valleywag picked up on that and reported it, only to find out it was news to Scoble as well. Just add the mishap to already boiling bad blood between the two.

This first sent Scoble into a bit a Twitter frenzy, denying the rumors and wondering why the information wasn’t validated before reporting.

Olsen was quick to label the misTwitter as a joke, though it is still unclear whether that was the punch line or the set-up. In an update, Nick Douglas at Valleywag says Furrier’s firing of Scoble is a running internal gag.

No matter, Scoble seems quite dismayed. On the Scobleizer blog, he proves why men shouldn’t hold babies – the responsibility of it can be overwhelming. Holding a friend’s newborn, he wondered "how am I making her world better?"

That’s a heavy question, one that apparently pulled Scoble into the depths of blogging despair:

Tonight I looked over my Twitters and blogs. They are angry. Confrontational. Disturbed. Hurt. Dismayed.
Those are not words to describe someone in a state of mind to improve the world. Part of it is so many people are making stuff up about me and/or my employer without any care as to my feelings or the truth that I’ve got to get some distance…. It really depresses me cause I thought blogging would be a tool for humans to get smarter, not stupider.
So, I’m going to try something else for a while…. In our book Naked Conversations I wrote that a good blog is “authoritative and passionate.” Truth is that when I looked at Steve Ball’s baby I realized I’ve been neither….I’ll be back blogging when I can add value again.

If you’ve followed Scoble for any length of time then you know that he takes periodic breaks to refuel and retool, especially when something upsets him.

But the episode underscores an important issue in blogging: it’s a very, very public life, and it’s not for everyone.

And as for the stream-of-consciousness-blogging Twitter allows? Well, you should ask Steve Rubel how much trouble that can cause, especially for those in the PR biz.