Robert Scoble @Scobleizer still breaking the social graph

UPDATE: Watch the full interview.

Robert Scoble begins each of his YouTube interviews by asking people two simple questions: "Who are you?" and "What do you do?"

It's a habit he said he developed while working as an evangelist for Microsoft, helping him keep the interviews straight because he was too lazy to label his videotapes.

Scoble has interviewed thousands of tech innovators over the years, currently doing so for the site Building43 as an employee of Rackspace, a hosting company based in Texas. Along the way he's fulfilled similar roles for PodTech and Fast Company.

By employing Scoble to roam the tech world interviewing startups, Rackspace gets the benefit of having him as an ambassador, an outreach resource, and, importantly, a reliable source of industry research, all useful in the company's battle for customers against similar services offered by Amazon.com.

"I learned that the best companies had an institutional way of learning about its marketplace," he said. "And that's what Rackspace pays me to do. They say, go out in the world and study what's going on on the bleeding edge. Figure out why people are going with Amazon or with other companies and try to warn us if you see some change in the marketplace, and bring that learning back."

His highly-viewed interviews have introduced a myriad of company founders to the world, something that ends up helping his employer in a not-so-intangible way.

"People remember that Rackspace showed up and helped my company launch, and we get a lot out of that," he said.

A self-described journalist employed by a non-media company, he's built a reputation for openness since he started blogging in 2000.

In 2003 Scoble took a job at Microsoft, but kept blogging about what he was working on. His blog, Scobleizer.com, was a phenomenon at that time, when unvarnished opinions offered from rank-and-file employees of big companies were still somewhat of a novelty.

He wasn't a Microsoft spokesperson, regardless of the "spokesblogger" tag some hung on him. But he did offer his candid opinions, sometimes lauding Microsoft's competitors.

"I had been blogging before I got to Microsoft for a long time," Scoble said. "I had a schtick and I just said 'Well I'm going to keep doing what I have been doing.'"

There were the occasional accidents, such as when he posted a video of an unreleased product that hadn't been patented yet. He would also post some of CEO Steve Ballmer's internal company-wide emails (after getting the OK from public relations).

"The PR team didn't really take it seriously at the beginning," he said of his blogging from his own website. "They didn't think it was something that they needed an official strategy about, in the way companies today have official social media strategies."

Scoble said that he's always believed that whenever any employee speaks to the public, they are seen as representing their company in some way.

The combination of candor and connectedness in relation to tech news has won him many followers over the years, a trend that has only grown with the advent of social media. Scoble is often among the first to participate in any new social media service, and among the most followed on many.

Several years ago Facebook reportedly stated that Robert Scoble was breaking the social graph, because more than 5,000 people had wanted to friend him. Since then, of course, the multitudes of people using social media have made this number seem tiny (although it's still a limit on Facebook for personal accounts).

And the work goes on. Late one recent evening he had a backlog of five videos to post before going to sleep. Not that he remembers every interview he's done.

"I've interviewed now three or four thousand people, so they're all getting mixed up in my head," Scoble said.

But the most recent stories are freshest in his mind. Over the past month he's done videos about 955 Dreams, Word Lens, Urban Airship, Steve Wozniak giving a tour of the Computer History Museum, CES and the various tablets launched there, and more.

About Word Lens, an "augmented reality app" that instantaneously translates the text on live images from Spanish to English, he said, "It doesn't work for everything, but when it does work, it's magic."

His latest fascination? Quora, the social question-and-answer site started by Facebook co-founder Adam D'Angelo.

Scoble posts his email and cell phone number on his website, although email senders receive an autoresponder saying how he may not be able to get back to them. But going hand-in-hand with his goal of openness, he tries to also be as accessible as possible.

"I remember reading a book about Madonna and she had a quote: 'Exploit yourself before everybody else does,'" he said. "And I sort of turned that into 'Exploit your privacy before Mark Zuckerberg does.'"

"In other words," he said, "be more public than anybody expects, and then you don't have any surprises."