Baron blogs at length about the development at his Dembot blog, and reveals in the process the two-year set back that occurred upon Amanda Congdon’s sudden and dramatic departure in 2006. Baron is more than happy to note New York courts refused to acknowledge Congdon as co-owner of Rocketboom.

The courts’ denial of Congdon’s claims was two years in the making, though, and Baron says he was unable to accept investment offers or partnerships while matters were tied up in court. This meant Rocketboom ran out of money at fairly regular intervals while trying to get the startup off the ground.

Sounds like Rocketboom good times are here again with the Sony deal. Baron discussed the options, which included the rejection of Federated Media and blip.tv because of exclusivity demands, along with accepting investments from sale-minded venture capitalists. He also cited (and criticized) the relative success of other webcasts that went on to spawn online video networks.

"Aside from the hit shows which have spawned the networks, most of the other shows on these networks have not lived up to their predecessors, content-wise, and new shows are often canceled soon after they are launched. This may be an indication of content quality more-so than a pre-profit phase of a nascent marketplace."

So, driven by a desire to maximize exposure and revenue while maintaining control of a single video entity, Baron chose a strategic partnership with Sony over other major corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and ABC because he viewed Sony as the "complete package." Sony’s expansive network and solid distribution infrastructure were the hot buttons for Baron. 
 

It looks like the Amanda Across America tour will include a stop at the unemployment office. An unremarkable year with ABC, aside from a mildly controversial stint doing videos for chemical giant DuPont, ended not with a bang, but silence.

MediaBistro’s TVNewser confirmed what FishbowlLA and Gawker had been whispering about – Amanda Cong-done:

Here’s the statement from ABC:

"It’s been a great year with Amanda – a great experiment for both of us. We thank her for her many contributions and know that she’s about to embark on new endeavors and expect there will be times in the future that we can again work together."

We think this translates to "here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?" in Hollywood-speak. As for her response, there isn’t one on her personal blog, which has not been updated since September 12th.

When news of her work for DuPont, approved by ABC, began making the rounds in March, Congdon blew off criticism, saying "I am not subject to the “rules” traditional journalists have to follow."

That may or may not be true, but Congdon is certainly subject to the whims of traditional media, as ABC has demonstrated.

And that’ll run you about $3000 a pop. It raises to $5000 after September.

Baron also has set up a Rocketboom channel on YouTube, where you can make yourself with all that Joanne (and maybe some Amanda, too, but I didn’t look that far.)

What was most interesting about Baron’s blog post was a short history detailing how much the site struggled in the beginning and about how difficult it was to keep the show afloat.

He writes:

Just over a year ago, we ran out money for Rocketboom. We were not mature enough to consider investments and so I decided Rocketboom had to go forward with an E-bay auction….

I’ll never forget the fear of failure that buit up to 5 seconds before the auction ended a loser, followed by a final refresh click with just 2 seconds to go that suddenly showed a $40,000 winner. To this day, I had never publicized that $40,000 was actually our reserve, helping to set the high market value.

As such, the vlog that launched the career of Amanda Congdon is looking for other revenue streams, according to Market Watch‘s Frank Barnako.

Baron wowed the audience at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo last October, speaking about monetization strategies and announcing he’d just closed a deal for $80,000 for a week’s worth of ads.

But that was when Rocketboom was peaking at 300,000-plus downloads. In the past six months, downloads have dwindled to 200,000. That’s still a hefty audience, but as Baron mentions at Market Watch, advertisers are seeking millions, rather than hundreds of thousands.

If dealing in text, an audience the size of Lexington, KY may be more than enough to attract certain advertisers on traditional terms. The cost of online video, however, means higher ad prices to pay for it, and advertisers start wincing.

So now the pioneer in the industry is forced to redirect, focus on merchandizing and consider a subscription model. This is interesting mostly because of Baron’s openness – the world (well, the small world that’s paying attention) is watching as this young man struggles with a model.

In the meantime, Baron is taking consulting jobs and speaking gigs to fund his outfit.

"What he’s finding out is that it’s a new medium that advertisers are willing to experiment with but its not a standard practice in their marketing," said iEntry Inc. CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord.

"Metrics are difficult with online video. Marketers still aren’t using the Internet for branding, they’re using it for direct response."

Perhaps the issue here is tallying up the value of a 3-minute daily broadcast that is incredibly niche – but is also incredibly limited. What News Corp. is proving with MySpace, and what Google is proving with YouTube, is that the value is in community building.

A community, with its various topics, provides various audiences in their own niches. But their collective value will be stunning.

Using the BRAVIA Internet video link, your TV will be connected to your home broadband network via Ethernet.

I already do some of this with TiVo, notably subscribing to Rocketboom and a few other podcats using the premier DVR service. But having the ability to subscribe to and review text feeds on your TV? The way it’s going, every medium is the message.

Photo from Gizmodo.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

In case you missed it, Scott Johnson, Andy Beal, Robert Scoble, and Philipp Lenssen all agreed that a voluntary code of practice for bloggers, and a government-run but consumer-enforced agency to make sure they volunteer for the code, was a bad idea.

A really bad idea. The word “poppycock” comes to mind, though in Kentucky we like phrases like “horse-feathers!” and “fiddle-sticks!”

The late arrivals to my inbox were SEObook‘s Aaron Wall, Rocketboom‘s Andrew Baron, and none other than everybody’s favorite topless podcaster, Soccergirl.

Here, simply, is what they had to say:

Quit tiptoeing, Soccergirl. Tell us how you really feel. Baron was skeptical too, and diplomatic, as he’s known to be.

While Baron can imagine it, Wall likes it just the way it is and wonders who watches the watchdogs.

Let me interject here at the end, because you know, I’m not typically one to voice my own opinions. (If you buy that, I’ve got some more stuff for sale.)

The blogosphere is the nearest rebirth society has seen of the oral tradition, where stories are handed down to others, continually modified and corrected and reconnected as needed. Speech regulators, a long, long time ago, squashed that tradition for various reasons, but their main one was, there was no real control of it, no way to settle once and for all how the story goes.

Hence the invention of writing things down on paper – once applied in permanent ink and made official by the appropriate bodies, there was now an unchangeable tale, and a means for redress for socially unacceptable ideas.

Redress. That is the word Tim the Toolman used, wasn’t it? As if it’s dressed wrong in the first place.

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She’s also planning to develop a comedy series for HBO. Freed from the three-minute, small-screen constraints of the Internet, the one-time host of the Rocketboom video blog is capitalizing on her 15 minutes of fame as quickly as she can.

An ABC executive must have glowed when discussing Congdon’s potential in a BusinessWeek interview:

Catherine Holahan, the writer who crafted the article as well as a mild Q&A session with Congdon, dubbed her a “cewebrity” for her web celebrity. Though Congdon isn’t the first person to crossover from online to traditional media, she is probably the best known right now.

Amit Agarwal suggested how others might follow Congdon out of the Internet tubes:

Frank Barnako’s take on the Congdon buzz shifted quickly into gleeful prodding at the new “cewebrity” on his blog at MarketWatch:

It’s one thing to make it up the hill, but another to stay there. Congdon is hooking up with very big media today. Tomorrow, who knows where she may be?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

She says we need a “likeability” stat. I think it goes further than that.

There’s another stat out there called “engagement.” No one is measuring it that I know of.

What do I mean?

Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.

Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.

So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser?

Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale.

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.

How could we measure audience engagement?

Is this something that Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab could do? If he could, that’d be a valuable company that advertisers would die to buy stuff from.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Vlogger Insights Online Spat

Oftentimes, successful broadcasters are not necessarily known for their Monday shows.

That’s because, as scientists recently confirmed, Mondays are made up of tiny particles known as grumpitons, or, as they are known in the vernacular, “general pissiness” (in other circles they are called thetans).

Amanda Congdon’s public unbooming was scheduled for a Monday, but July 4th holiday travel caused delays as well as holiday hangover grumpiton buildup (commonly referred to as “the gout”).

Ze Frank’s Monday show was conceived from the same side of the bed where Rocketboom viewer numbers were steadily and incessantly craw-chapping, sending general pissiness levels through the roof. The focus was on tips for starting a vlog and how to convince advertisers to sponsor your show. Ze Frank recommends inflating your numbers, just like Rocketboom.

“Now all you have to do is become popular,” said Ze Frank in his deadpan instructional video voice. “The great thing about the web is that there is no universal mechanism to track and verify statistics. If you want to be popular just go ahead and say you’re popular. I call it Rocketbooming.”

Using Alexa numbers, Ze Frank illustrated that “The Show” attracted 30,000 viewers, which was significantly more than Rocketboom. Rocketboom claims to reach as many as 350,000 viewers daily, a number Ze Frank disputes.

“If you want to be popular just stick to your own background statistics and BS, and people will start paying attention,” he said.

Or, he should have added, publicly slam a more successful vlog. See, here’s a whole article about it already.

Baron didn’t take the Alexa graph lying down:

Baron attributes Ze Frank’s relative lack of success to his Web 1.0 ways:

Translation: Ze Frank doesn’t play nice with others. For this crime, the Rodney King of bloggers, Chris Brogan thinks that the glassy early stages of vlogging could do without the rock throwing.

Wow. I didn’t know the Democrats were in on this too. A supportive commentator at Ze Frank’s blog writes, “38DD. And that’s no rocketboom.” While that has nothing to do with this, it’s more interesting than the phrase “gladiator economy.”

Interestingly, neither Baron while defending himself, nor Brogan mentions that Alexa numbers are hardly a basis for comparing hard data. This is the same webmaster-dominated toolbar that incorrectly found YouTube had surpassed MySpace in daily visits and that Matt Cutts’ blog was as popular as Ask.com.

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The campaign will come to a close tomorrow morning at 8am sharp with a scripted finale that you won’t want to miss. Along the way, Versu has awakened the imagination of not just loads of Second Life residents who have come out and made her 72 hour journey their own, but also many watchers who have heard about her efforts online. For a collection of blog posts about the event, check out http://del.icio.us/tag/nyclivewindow. A few highlights include being the featured story on Rocketboom, getting picked up by Slashdot, and a ClickZ article that was just published.

There are also several larger media pieces planned after the event in many longer lead print publications which will be published over the next few weeks. Despite Sun launching their virtual press conference in close proximity to this event, it looks like Intel’s effort to do something original to illustrate the power of the Core 2 Duo chip and Centrino mobile technology is winning lots of rave reviews. My favourite so far comes from Eric Rice (aka “Spin Martin”):

I love this event. Why? It’s blogged. It’s podcasted. It’s videoblogged (by way of machinima). And it walks along that line of social network spaces and video game spaces. It’s profitable. It’s performance art. It’s real-time. It’s social. It’s a use of advertising that’s not preachy, but demonstrable use of products. It’s *everything*.

Thanks for playing WITH us, Intel, and not talking AT us.

Kudos to Intel for getting it right at a time when it is becoming increasingly common to see stories of companies getting it wrong take up more than their fair share of the headlines.

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Rohit Bhargava is the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com