Robert Scoble is currently turing the US giving a variety of talks on social media. As announced on Chris Knudsen’s blog he’ll be in Utah on March 2 for "Podcast interviews with select executives, entrepreneurs, or technologists" and a talk entitled "Living in a Google World".

While Scoble’s star burned brightly in the nascent blogging pre-dawn he has been eclipsed on multiple sides. His superficial questioning with clunky follow-up (an aw-shucks ‘guy next door’ effect while at Microsoft) is exposed as high-school journalistic, at best, in the real world. After leaving Microsoft Scoble has tried to parlay his early adopter celebrity status into business built around video interviews with himself, with a number of miss steps. There were allusions to financial impropriety while covering John Edward’s announcement to run for President. Then there was the rant about how tech blogs weren’t linking to a recent video - a video which was discovered to be little more than paid product placement by Intel. He defended the act by saying that "Intel chips were more important than cancer". He then signed on to be the keynote for PostieCon, a convention put on by the loathed Pay Per Post company. He’s now out shaking hands at events like the one in Utah in desperate fashion presumably because PodTech, his handler, is in trouble.

Of course, this Utah event seems to be angling more toward the business/entrepreneur/starved attention seeking set rather than the geek set, so maybe the attendees and host were made for each other.

Personally, Scoble seems to be the average tech guy who got thrust into a limelight that was much bigger than he was prepared to handle. The question remains whether he'll survive the early growing pains of his craft (disclosure, business models). How he deals with those will determine whether his stint as bloglebrity has legs or if he becomes the digerati equivalent of Charo.