First, disclosure, the gadget announcement coming tomorrow is from ScobleShow‘s sponsor: Seagate.
It is of a new product.

Steve Jobs should watch this video. Everyone else? Read your favorite gadget blogs for the quick and dirty non-shilled details without my shaky camera work or annoying laugh.

Or, meet me here at 4 a.m. Pacific Time for a little product launch. Emphasis on little.

Oh, and if you don’t like sponsored stuff, I have “Cooking with Geeks” coming up shortly too. A new little thing I’m doing with Fred Davis, one of the brains behind Wired Magazine, and a few others too.

Valleywag breathlessly reports that I was paid for doing my videos.

The problem is it isn’t true.

But, that doesn’t mean I’m in the clear either.

PodTech WAS paid for doing a video, and other work, for Intel. We should have clearly marked that as sponsored content. It was not. So, eggs and tomatoes should be flying in my direction. “Incoming!”

Now, for MY videos I was not paid. I only have one sponsor: Seagate.

Intel had no clue what I would be doing when I did my videos. They didn’t get to approve questions beforehand. They didn’t have editing ability (what’s called “prior restraint” in the business). They didn’t get to see my videos before they went up.

Now you understand why I don’t generally edit my videos. I have a conversation. You get to see that conversation. It gets boring sometimes. I have an annoying laugh I wish I could edit out sometimes. I have rough camera work sometimes. My questions suck sometimes. But you get to see it all.

PodTech paid for all my expenses to Intel, including my flight, hotel, and meals.

One thing about this. I answer all questions. If you have any questions, just leave them here and I’ll answer best as I can.

UPDATE: Dan Farber of ZDNet did some original reporting on this issue (has been contacting a bunch of us involved in ZDNet and getting us on the record).

If you think raising a stink, getting lots of conversations going, getting onto TechMeme and all that, will get you major traffic then you’d be wrong (those are my stats from a few minutes ago for the past month).

In other words, throwing your relationships with other people under the bus just ain’t worth it.

That spike? That was CES. Most of that came for the interviews with Bill Gates and John Chambers and the Retrevo gang.

Oh, add to those stats 55,720 RSS subscribers (WordPress.com shows those stats in a separate graph). That’s just astounding to me. I remember when I used to joke that I had 18 readers (and the truth was pretty darn close to that).

Scoble: screwing up his relationships with other bloggers so you don’t have to. 🙂