In this Sunday’s NY Times Arts & Leisure section, Rocketboom‘s Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron get the star treatment they deserve in a very good — and admiring — story about vlogging.
One big bit of news therein is that Rocketboom has cut a deal with TiVo to let its customers download the vlog. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to say it: They’ll be able to record and watch Rocketboom just as easily as they can record Jon Stewart. So now the little fish swim in the same pond with the big fish. That’s what citizens’ media is all about.
Rocketboom will get half of the revenue for ads wrapped around their vlogs. That is great news. And that’s what big media’s relationship with citizens’ media should be about.
Bravo! Brava! Encore!
: Some blurbable lines from the story by Robert Mackey:
Amanda Congdon is a big star on really small screens….
What makes Rocketboom so different from most other video blogs… is that the daily episodes are consistently entertaining. With Mr. Baron, 35, the designer who created the site and films the episodes, Ms Congdon, 24, has fashioned a quirky, charming persona, with an inventive take on the news that is closer in spirit to Letterman than CNN.
The fact that she is an attractive young woman probably doesn’t hurt either….
In fact, the day Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, introduced the video iPod to developers, he showed a playlist of video podcasts on his computer. Rocketboom was at the top….
And here is Mr. Mackey’s contribution to the doctrine of exploding TV:
Until now, both the television and film industries have been built on a model that requires producers to appeal to millions of people or be considered failures. If Amanda Congdon at one end of the spectrum and Charlene Rule at the other continue to add viewers at the rate they’re going, they and the best of the other vloggers might just provide a viable alternative to that lowest-common-denominator business model.
In other words, the revolution may just be vloggerized.
