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I know, I know. "Not more about Scoble!" you cry out, glancing at the title of this blog post. Or perhaps you're thinking, "first Kevin Bacon, and now this?"

If you've never heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, or of Erdős numbers, it might be a good idea to read up on the concept behind these, and other numbers of "collaborative distance". The only thing new here is that this number is for microblogging, and uses Robert Scoble as the font of all things Twitter-ish. (I'll explain why Scoble, shortly.)

The idea's pretty simple:

1. Robert Scoble has a Scoble number of 0.
2. People who Robert Scoble has referenced (whether as a retweet, or in passing in a tweet, or a public reply) have a Scoble number of 1.
3. People referenced in a similar fashion by someone with a Scoble number of n have a Scoble number of n + 1.
4. People who are not connected in this fashion to Robert Scoble have an undefined Scoble number.

Of course, there's also the "Extended Scoble number" for people who have been directly referenced by Robert Scoble multiple times. Rather than having a static Scoble number of 1, their extended number is 1 ÷ n, where n is the number of times they've been referenced by Scoble.

So why Scoble?

It's simple. While there are Twitter users who have more followers than @scobleizer, and others who tweet more often (myself, for example), I doubt there is any single user out there who is more active at promoting people via Twitter. That makes Robert a great choice as the starting point for this madcap adventure, as many of the people he mentions likewise message, retweet, and otherwise mention other users. This results in fewer users with an undefined number.

In the end, this is really just an excuse to have fun with math and the social network. Twitter's built-in following system is probably a better way to map out the network, but it never hurts to find some interesting and amusing alternate solution, especially if it means I get to crunch numbers.