An American blogger, technical evangelist, and author.

How did you get involved in tech?

I grew up in silicon valley, I had no choice. My Dad was an engineer and I grew up in Cupertino about a mile from Apple Computers. I had an Apple Computer in 1977, in my junior high I was in the first computer club , and I got a tour of Apple when they were one little building. So yeah, I’ve always been around tech.

What do you do now?

I explore the world for cool things on the internet, that’s really what I’m doing. I’m building distributed community called Building43 for people that are fanatical about the internet. Hope you guys will be there.

What turned you onto Disqus?

It was one of the first things that was shoving data into FriendFeed. I saw people were adding it to their blog and the comments showing up on FriendFeed right away. That federation of data across domains was pretty interesting to me. I pretty much ignored it for a long time but one thing I do I watch thousands of people around the internet and see which things get adopted and which things get talked about. Disqus kept coming up. That’s a good example, there is some pressure on me to change my behavior because people are getting excited about something. That’s how Disqus got onto my radar screen.

What did you always dream of becoming as a kid?

I wanted to be a professional photographer. I was a really hardcore photographer in high school playing with color photography while other kids were doing black and white. I quickly found out that there is very little money in photography. That is unless you get Pulitzer Prize or something. I still do photography and carry around my equipment. Now I go around and study what geeks are up too.

What one feature would you like to see on Disqus?

That’s an interesting question. I’d like to see more data about the people who are commenting. For instance, if Tim (that works for a popular publishing company) comes and leaves a comment, that’s different than Joe that leaves a comment that I don’t know. First of all I know Tim, there should be some sort of link there that says  Tim and Robert have gone back and forth with each other a while. Plus I know a lot about Tim, he runs a publishing company and he should have a built in human authority and credibility that somebody else might not have. If he comes over and writes a comment about the publishing industry. He is going to have more of an impact than other people. I’ve seen it happen over and over again where a lot of the time comments get lost or newbies don’t know who Tim is. So they don’t know that his comment has more importance or weight to it. Not saying that Joe’s comment does not have importance or weight. If Barrack Obama came over and left a comment, we would all know that he is very authoritative and yet he would be mixed in with all the comments. You could go by his comment and not know if he said something interesting.

I hope commenting systems become something that I can really get into your social graph. So I can understand you at a level that I can’t understand by just going to your facebook page.

To learn more about Robert check out his twitter, website, or Disqus Profile.

These are excerpts from a full audio interview that you may listen to here.

Cheers,