Robert Scoble, Microsoft's famed corporate blogger, is leaving Redmond for Silicon Valley. He plans to join podcasting startup PodTech.net. The Scobleizer weblog has been perhaps the country's highest-profile experiment in company-sanctioned blogging, and the news of Scoble's departure, which broke Saturday, has lit up the Web. "Scoble" even briefly outranked "World Cup" as the top request on blog search engine Technorati, sending so much Web traffic to PodTech that its website was still unreachable by Monday morning. "Robert did more in his three years at Microsoft to improve the corporate image than any one I know," blogs Microsoft executive Don Dodge.

Scoble appears to have left Microsoft on good terms for greener pastures, but some believe he was underappreciated. "He has created a tremendous amount of positive publicity for Microsoft, but there have been many within the organization that have resented his very public position," notes Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher. "It is only within the past year that MSFT has tried to use his position as one of the most popular bloggers to its advantage."

Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed, however, thinks the whole affair is overblown. "My view is that Scoble is a cute media sideshow, but ultimately irrelevant," writes Kedrosky. "Fellow bloggers are entertained and enraptured by the sight of some tech PR guy (which is what Scoble really is/was) being touted as the Next Big Thing in media, but there is really very little there there."