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Rocketboom
Host(s)	Amanda Congdon (October 26, 2004 to July 5, 2006) Joanne Colan (July 12, 2006 to present)
Website	http://www.rocketboom.com/
Update schedule	Daily
RSS	http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/rss.html
Atom	http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/atom.xml

Rocketboom is a daily vlog produced by Andrew Baron. It was launched on October 26, 2004 and was hosted by Amanda Congdon^[1] until she left on July 5, 2006. Joanne Colan began hosting on July 12, 2006^[2].

Description

Rocketboom is presented in the format of a newscast with a comedic slant. Each weekday Rocketboom offers oddities, vlog excerpts and explores emerging social movements. It sometimes presents political commentary. Apart from an occasional use of old newsreel footage or vintage commercials, mainstream media is avoided. The Rocketboom weblog and Apollo Pony feature supplemental material that isn't fit for the vlog.

Distribution

Rocketboom is available on the website, Akimbo, Democracy, and via an RSS 2.0 feed. Viewers may subscribe to feeds using a podcast aggregator such as Apple Inc. iTunes or Juice, which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically. In addition to TiVo, it is also available on Windows Media Center with a third party plug-in from mcesoft [1].

People

The core Rocketboom production team consists of Andrew Baron (writer, producer, director), Amanda Congdon (host, writer, producer) and then Joanne Colan (host, writer, producer), Kenyatta Cheese (Producer) and Joe Bonacci (Editor). Rocketboom and Rocketboom Human Wire's World Video Report both present webcasts packaged by its correspondents in the United States, Europe and Kenya: Annie Tsai (Los Angeles), Andy Carvin (Washington DC), Zadi Diaz (Los Angeles), Ruud Elmendorp (Nairobi), Steve Garfield (Boston), Milt Lee (South Dakota), Chuck Olsen (Minneapolis), Bre Pettis (Seattle), Tyson Root (Houston), Stefan M. Seydel (Switzerland/Germany/Austria) and Graham Walker (Prague).

Popularity

Rocketboom interviewed Jimbo Wales at the Time 100 Most Influential People Gala as featured on this vlog as of May 8, 2006.

When Rocketboom debuted in 2004, it went from an initial 700 viewers to 70,000 viewers in its first ten months. The vlog's success was noted in the summer of 2005 by CBS Evening News^[3], Wired News^[4] and other publications. BusinessWeek labeled it "the most popular site of its kind on the Net."^[5] The January 9, 2006, issue of Newsweek stated that Rocketboom had "130,000 daily viewers."

On February 2, 2006 Rocketboom was incorporated into an episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in a fictional scene of a murderer watching a Rocketboom commentary on the crime.^[6] In the month following the CSI episode, the number of Rocketboom viewers jumped to 200,000. As noted by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times (2006-03-11), this is similar to the size of a small cable show audience. In "A Blog Writes the Obituary of TV,"^[7] Mitchell wrote:

One recent week, the video blog Rocketboom drew an average of 200,000 people a day to watch its short daily news reports on technology, the arts and other topics. The Abrams Report on MSNBC, meanwhile, drew 215,000 viewers to its weekday hourlong show about legal issues. Does this anecdote -- that an unpopular cable news show and a wildly popular Web site draw similarly sized audiences -- prove that the Internet is upending the economics of the television business? It does for Prince Campbell, a former media executive who runs the Chartreuse (BETA) blog. Mr. Campbell wields superlatives in a particularly bloggish manner at chartreuse.wordpress.com. "Broadcast television is dead," he declares. "Just like the Internet killed the music industry, it's about to do the same thing to broadcast TV."

In April and May 2006, Rocketboom introduced its first commercials. The first commercial sponsors were TRM and Earthlink.^[8] Each of which was a series of 5 commercials shown, one per day, over the week that they were featured.

In Fall of 2006, Rocketboom's popularity claims and self-published statistics came into question. In an interview with Dow Jones, Baron claimed "400,000 viewers per day" and that "some episodes are more popular and receive well over a million complete downloads."^[9] After extensive analysis^[10] BusinessWeek reported that Rocketboom provided incorrect statistics data resulting in "cutting in half the original estimate... to 78,500 downloads" and noting that Rocketboom refused "to let any third party... verify these stats."^[11]

Spoofs, Knock-Offs, Reviews

Video bloggers chimed in with their spin to Rocketboom's He Said^[12]/She Said^[13] with posted clips of their take on Rocketboom founders' separation in July, 2006. Parodies include MissleBlast^[14] and RocketBum^[15] in the style of SNL/In Living Color/MadTV, or YouTube LisaNova on LittleLoca performances. The former producing "Soup of the Day" knock-offs, and the latter a male in drag replacement anchor, attempting to reinvent Comic-As-News medium now dominated by award winning the Daily Show and Colbert Report. CIOInsight Edward Cone interview of Amanda Congdon sums it up: On the Set with Web Video's Crossover Star^[16].

References

• BusinessWeek: "Splitsville at Rocketboom"
• BusinessWeek: "Rocketboom's Powerful Lift-Off"
• chartreuse (BETA)
• Glaser, Mark. Mediashift: "Rocketboom Nets $80,000 After eBay Auction"
• Interview with Baron on TUAW
• Newsweek: "Right to the Top" (1/9/06)
• Robin Good interviews Baron and Congdon

External links

• Rocketboom

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