Why do people read scobleizer.wordpress.com?

I’m interested to hear why exactly do people read Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger? Personally I read Scoble’s little rants just for entertainment value and comment there to try to make sense of what he posts as a lot of the time his posts leave you thinking “what the?” and scratching your head.

I think a lot of people actually read Scoble’s blog to stay on the cutting edge and to find out about all the new, cool stuff so they can keep up with the Jones’ and that just seems a little bit sad to me.

What has happened to the quality of beta software?

What has happened to the age old process of releasing software where the main stages are:

Alpha – Development use only, still not feature complete with any number of bugs
Beta – Feature complete & major bugs fixed
Preview Release – This is typically beta quality software released so people can get a preview of the new software
Release Candidate – feature complete and both major & minor bugs fixed with only obscure bugs left

It seems both sides of the software world, commercial/proprietary and open source are just releasing software willy nilly and not following any kind of pattern, take for example SimpleMachines 1.1, it was at RC1 for quite a long time and then RC2 comes out with significant new features included, did someone forget to tell them what Release Candidate is supposed to mean? Then we have Micosoft with Internet Explorer 7’s public beta that has had numerous significant bugs reported along with a suspected security hole already, I guess that wouldn’t be too bad but IE is so embedded in Windows you have to replace your current version of IE in order to try it and in doing so you are potentially affecting the whole Operating System bringing it down to beta level, that is just not good at all!