The power of going alone

Ad Age covers the departures of Robert Scoble, Om Malik, and Thomas Hawk to smaller ventures that will end up being bigger for them:

In the last two weeks, Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Thomas Hawk quit their jobs in favor of pioneering careers. Big deal. So did probably hundreds of other Americans, right? But unlike the former three, the latter hundreds didn’t find their opportunities by first becoming household brand names online.

Messrs. Scoble, Malik and Hawk-respectively, a Microsoft technologist, a Business 2.0 magazine writer and an investment-adviser-turned-photographer-may be relatively unknown names in the general populace. But they are among the elite in the blog world.