Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy.com.

I’ve interviewed Robert Scoble several times about how to become Internet famous because I’m dying to get some fame. I know it’s not the kind of thing I’m supposed to admit, but I’ve noticed that people who are better known have an easier time launching and growing projects.

Scoble is one of Forbes’ 10 biggest Web celebrities, but he’s also ultra-patient, so he indulged my quest. Here’s what he taught me:

Attack Where There isn’t a King

Web 2.0 already has its big names. Why waste time fighting them for dominance?

Scoble told me to notice how big Gary Vaynerchuk became by going after wine, an industry that didn’t have an online celebrity until he got there. “If I started out today,” he said, “I think I would follow Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.”

Follow the 15 Reader Rule

Building a reputation takes time. So you have to focus on a subject that you’re passionate enough about to keep pursuing, even when hardly anyone else notices. “Passion,” he told me, “will keep you going after you figure out you only have 15 readers.”

Get With REAL Celebrities

I think Hollywood is a big waste of time, but I can’t deny that movie stars are the real celebrities. Scoble told me to find ways to connect with them. I’ve interviewed several Internet CEOs who told me their traffic jumped just by featuring movie stars.

“Mix in celebrities from movies with the technology,” he told me, when I insisted that I’m obsessed with interviewing Internet success stories.

Start the Avalanche

I wake up every morning wanting to take over the world. Scoble suggested I take a step back and dominate one small niche first, then another and another until I start my avalanche.

“All avalanches start with one snowflake,” he said.

Keep Producing

I got to know about Scoble because I kept seeing him online. That’s part of his plan. He keeps producing content so that he stays on top of Google’s search results and stays connected to his readers. I’ve watched him pull out his iPhone between conversations and add content to FriendFeed, Twitter and other sites.

His biggest message to me was: “Publish a lot, because this is a Google world.”

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Do you have any suggestions for how to become Internet famous? Add them to the comments.

Andrew Warner’s last internet company was a big stinking failure and he had to shut it down. To keep from having a company collapse again, he’s interviewing as many Internet successes as he can. You can hear his interviews on Mixergy.

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Update: I was able to catchup with Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV and asked him about the move today. He said, "I love REV3 and the people there and sometimes you need to adjust to the market and see what works and doesn’t and I love those guys and wish all of them super well and hope they Kill it and do nothing but awesome things! As for Wine Library Tv I will continue to Crush it on winelibrarytv.com everyday!"

Update 2: On the TWIT podcast last night, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis said regarding the staff size at Revision3, "30 (staff) is kind of high for that kind of company."

Revision3 has announced some major show changes today. Epic-Fu will no longer be carried by Revision3 at the end of December and the Wine Library TV show will be removed as of today. Several other shows have also been cut. CEO Jim Louderback also noted that they are working on a variety of new shows that may hit the lineup soon. Wine Library TV joined the lineup back in June with a slimmed down version of their daily show. Louderback notes the huge popularity of Diggnation as one of their "winners".

Mashable is also reporting that some staff members at Revision3 were fired today including their head of business development Damon Berger. It’s important to note that we will never know the real reason for these people being let go.

In other online video news, Robert Scoble has announced that he is "restructuring" his WorkFastTV show which is broadcast live from the Revision3 offices. No further details have been provided about this restructuring. I think the show has made some good overall progress since I provided my initial commentary and suggestions for improvement this summer. I’d like to see them make the site a bit more friendly. Remember that with video you could be sitting on the site for quite a while, make the appearance relaxing and engaging.

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Have you considered a career working with Robert Scoble? Are you having sleepless nights wondering what it would be like to work at Fast Company TV with the master of FriendFeed Robert Scoble? Well then, have I got the job for you! Here are the job details from Director of Social Media Lynne Johnson:

Looking for a senior or executive level editor passionate about the intersection of social media and journalism.

The ideal candidate will be able to jump start conversations in our community. The person will work closely with the president of Mansueto Digital Edward Sussman, Lynne D. Johnson (FC Director of Social Media), Robert Scoble, our managing director of FastCompany.TV, and the print team of Fast Company magazine.

The job is fun and high profile and right on the edge of what’s happening in publishing. We are looking for someone who can spit out loads of story ideas about innovation, the web, social media, sustainability, and other core FC topics — and then make them a reality.

Contact email: lynne@fastcompany.com

To be honest, it looks like a pretty strong social media opportunity. Their office has one of the best views of lower Manhattan out there!

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The Drupal NYC group is having their monthly meetup tonight in NYC. The group is going to discuss setting up Drupal and working with themes. Below is the live feed - should start at about 6:20pm Eastern.

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Last month we wrote about the "FriendFeed 9" which were the 9 defaults that FriendFeed offers to each new account. FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit says that only a few people actually see this default list because most new accounts are referred from someone else which eliminates this default list all together. I am not sure I agree with that - when the early adopter blogs posted about the new beta last week, how many new signups did FriendFeed see via direct links - I will bet that it’s most of them. In fact, the number must be great to the default list because default user Scoble noted yesterday that he can tell when FriendFeed is doing well in terms of user growth simply by how many new subs he gets via the default option.

With the launch of the new beta this week, I thought it was a perfect time to take a look and see where the FriendFeed 9 are now and whether they made any changes to the structure. The FriendFeed 9 is now the FriendFeed 24 - that’s the only change that has been made. The list is completely popularity based, not activity/usage based. This type of popularity list means that the 24 selected individuals will always appear on the list.

This is a very poor way to pimp people - it shows that FriendFeed doesn’t give two knishes about their loyal and active users. This is pretty clear because the most active FriendFeed user Mona (her blog) isn’t even on the list.

Here’s my video on the subject:

Robert Scoble says he wants off the list and in Louis Gray’s post today about the new FriendFeed he discusses this popularity list. He notes, "22 of those users were men, 22 were white and there were two Asian (one male, one female)".

All these popularity lists do is keep the top on top (without any quality backing) and never allow for any user/content discovery. I hope that FriendFeed will look into changing their default policy in the near future. I wrote this post and video because I think every startup should consider the lessons learned here for their own projects.

Over the past 24 hours, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and Michael Arrington have all asked essentially the same question. They are all wondering how they got so many followers on FriendFeed so quickly.

Here at the CenterNetworks Investigation Bureau, we have been investigating this topic since we first reported on it a month ago. Seriously. After the last month of investigation, we are now prepared to share our findings. Please view the video below for the analysis as to why these four people are getting so many followers so quickly. The answer might just surprise you.

So as you can see, FriendFeed has created "defaults" and the four people above are part of the nine-person default set. What this means is that when anyone signs up for a new account on FriendFeed, they are presented with the same nine people every single time. Twitter has no defaults, hence a slower signup rate.

I presented my research to a couple of other top bloggers last week who aren’t included in the default list and their initial response was that Jason and Mike weren’t even participating in FF (they are now which is great). Mack also misses the point when he tries to explain the follower numbers.

Update: two people have emailed me noting that Jason isn’t actively participating, just sharing Mahalo links. They make a good point, he’s only sharing links via the bookmarklet, not actually participating in the conversation (yet I hope).

Defaults don’t just mean more followers, they mean more traffic to the supporting content sites.

When I asked Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit about this, he said, "you are correct however that we should tweak the algorithm to increase diversity when browsing popular feeds such as Scoble’s — FriendFeed has grown by a few orders of magnitude since the algorithm was originally created and so it probably requires some updating." When I spoke with Paul, I hadn’t yet realized that there was this also default nine-person set.

My hope is that FriendFeed will expedite the algorithm change and create more diversity and discovery with their platform. Shouldn’t everyone who uses FriendFeed get a chance to be discovered instead of pushing the same nine people for all of eternity?

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There are times when "going live" is great. When there’s an earthquake or other catastrophy, it’s great. When you want to show gramma how your baby crawls on the floor while speaking with her on the phone, great. Other times, it’s not needed and can become more of an annoyance than anything.

Yesterday I sat in on a panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Conference in NYC. The panel was moderated by Esther Dyson and included the CEOs from CoverItLive, Qik, Mogulus and also Robert Scoble. Side note, if anyone would like me to post the full session video, I can. I didn’t find the session to be as strong as the talk Robert gave at MediaBistro last month.

Here’s a photo from the event. I’ve left out Esther who really didn’t say much for the entire panel except something at the end about oil prices and how Barack is going to fix the world. From the left: the CoverItLive CEO had no electronics on the stage and seemed to be the most involved in the discussion. Next to him is the Mogulus CEO who had a Macbook with a webcam apparently live and he moved the laptop all around during the panel. Next to him is the Qik CEO who had out his Nokia N95 and for most of the panel held up this camera so he could allow all of the Qik folks access to watch the panel. Last we have Robert Scoble who also had a Nokia N95 hooked up to Qik and his massive battery pack. In addition he had a Macbook Pro attached to the projector.

Every 2-3 seconds Robert was clicking on something and I found it to be very distracting. Speaking with a few other attendees, they said the same thing. Is it really necessary to watch Twitter, FriendFeed, Summize, Qik, Twittervision over and over every few seconds? If attendees want to monitor the activities, they can do it on their own devices.

This panel is only one example of this type of behavior. I’ve been seeing more and more of this and it’s disturbing. There’s absolutely no reason this panel had to be broadcast live. In fact, most conferences don’t need to be broadcast live. The sessions should absolutely be recorded but don’t need to be broadcast live.

In yesterday’s case, moderator Esther Dyson mentioned that attendees could text their questions in through Twitter. Great idea, but poor execution. Instead of having one of the panelists (scoble) monitoring for questions, let him actually be part of the panel and find an intern to monitor the backchannel for questions. It just takes away from the overall panel.

Another question regarding live conference broadcasting is: when will the conference organizers put a stop to the live broadcasts? If I can sit in my office and watch the conference, why spend the $2,000 to attend? Will DEMO and Techcrunch50 allow live broadcasting? What I can see is a PPV option where the conference provides the live streaming and charges a fee for it.

When I spend thousands of dollars and my time to attend a conference, I am really not interested in watching the Qik CEO broadcast the session live to everyone without paying attention to what’s going on in the moment. I also really don’t give a rats ass what people outside the conference think of what’s going on inside the room. I want to have the speaker’s full attention. I didn’t have that today - not by a longshot. And again, I am using this session as an example but the issue is much more widespread.

Let’s get back to why we go to conferences… the networking and the education. If you can’t be there for some reason, watch the sessions later on. Just because it’s cutsie and hip to go live all the time, doesn’t mean we need to.

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