Today I was hanging out at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, which consists mainly of marketing professionals who are looking for the best way to integrate social into their advertising campaigns. During a keynote with Guy Kawasaki and our friend Robert Scoble, the location-aware app Highlight was mentioned. A few times. And by a few, I mean about twenty. That’s cool though, Robert is a huge fan of the app and let us know that fifteen people in the room also used the app.

I wasn’t sure how the Highlight app fit into a discussion about trends in advertising, until Mr. Scoble dropped a bit of a teaser about an upcoming feature and functionality of the app:

Highlight shows you who’s around you, and soon…what’s around you.

His tone was extremely coy, as if he had just let a purring cat out of the bag. This kind of functionality isn’t new though, remember foursquare’s “Radar’ feature? The idea is that you’d turn this feature on and you’d be pinged with a notification when you became close to a popular location on the platform.

Only problem is, like Highlight, it eats the shit out of your phone’s battery:

I’ve made it clear that I’m personally not a fan of location-aware apps like Highlight, but if you’re in the Bay Area, there’s no way to get away from it. People are talking about it at meetups, mixers, and conferences, so there’s definitely a market for services like it.

If we take the battery drain issue out of the equation, people are finding this type of “always-on” real-time sharing to be helpful. If Highlight does indeed launch the feature that Scoble mentioned today, I can see how it could leap-frog foursquare’s Radar feature, which hasn’t gotten a lot of love from the team lately, and build a nice platform for small businesses to draw attention to themselves.

It’s surprising how much of the “creepy” factor we’ll ignore when we’re getting something “valuable” in return, but that’s how all of the big companies are handling things these days. We give all of our data to Google and Facebook but don’t worry about it since we’re getting something we use daily in return.

We’re not sure how soon this feature will be made available, but we’ll keep you up to date.

Are you a fan of location-aware apps? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Is Robert Scoble launching a super-duper angel venture capital investment fund or not? The question is on everyone’s lips, or at least on those of a couple of dudes currently having a Homerun Omelet at over at The Creamery in San Francisco.

Real Journalist® Dan Lyons says he is – definitely maybe – doing it, while the rest of planet Earth, including Robert Scoble, says it’s simply not true.

We’ve taken the time to do some of the heavy lifting for Dan Lyons, who recently pointed out that us tech bloggers could never become Real Journalists® because we’re hacks for hire and just too darn conflicted, and dug up some evidence that demystifies the matter at hand.

Behold ScobleFund.com, which was clearly made public by accident.

How Scoble finds time in between writing guest posts for The Next Web, flying all around the world to meet with interesting entrepreneurs, trolling Google+, interviewing founders and clipping his toenails on a ridiculously regular basis, we do not know.

But the fact remains that Scoble is launching a venture fund mysteriously dubbed ScobleFund (what could be behind that name?) that is being backed by TechCrunch alumni Sarah Lacy, Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, according to the aforementioned website.

So go forth and get ScobleFunded, dear founders, for “unlimited posts on Scobleizer.com” will be part of the deal.

For the record: none of this true, except the parts about Dan Lyons not properly fact-checking his stories and Scoble’s strange toenail clipping behavior.

(ScobleFund.com was made for fun by Massimo Chieruzzi, CEO of Creative Web)

Just as Google pays content creators a percentage of the advertising revenue on YouTube, the recent changes on Facebook encourage us to share more data and the introduction of the ‘Subscribe’ button means we can share our content and make it public like a blog. What the Subscribe button means is that we are all essentially our own news outlets and we are also content creators with strangers being able to subscribe and follow our updates.

Facebook, just like YouTube makes the majority of its revenue through advertising and pays content creators a creator’s fee. So at the press conference at F8 this morning, I asked Mark Zuckerberg if he thought Facebook would ever share a percentage of its advertising revenue to users, essentially paying us to post and share the things we love on Facebook.

Strangely, at the press conference, press wasn’t allowed to video Zuck, although photos and audio were allowed so I recorded his answer in the video below.

He said he had been too busy with their recent changes to think about this, to which I replied ‘I’ll only take 10%.’

Was it just a crazy question? Robert Scoble who makes a living from sharing thoughts and opinion on social networks, says most of the engagement comes on building audiences on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google + and not from the destination site.

As you can see in the video below Robert agrees with me that potentially we could be paid to Facebook. I don’t think this would be a good feature for everyone (some people just like to stay in touch with their friends) but for many people who are sharing more of their interestes and passions it will be a great incentive for content creators to use the Facebook platform instead of YouTube or others to create and monetize their content.

Mark Zuckerberg answers my questions (audio) 

Blogger Robert Scoble on monetizing content