Thursday, July 6, 2006

A little bit of Rocky Top on Mass. Ave So here I am lecturing at Harvard... Well, not exactly. But I am (back) in Cambridge preparing to steal a few smartaleck cliche-busting remarks from an East Tennessee friend and attempt to impress the Berkman Center weblog group with the RockyTopBrigade's general wit, wisdom and diversity... from R.Neal, KnoxViews in general, SayUncle, No Silence Here... and other non-law-professor bloggers... some of them more progressive than others... Consider it an unstallanche! After-the-fact addition: Here's a direct route to the RTB East Tennessee aggregator I talked about, one of the cool RSS things webmaster Johnny Dobbins cooked up for the group. I showed the News Sentinel's KnoxNews site, talked about things I like and don't like about it, and fumbled around trying to find its video blogs. Here they are: Random This. The site search engine didn't help much, even with the vlog page's name, but I later found it listed under "Entertainment" and "multimedia" on the site map. 7:10:21 PM     Rocketboom's world turned upside down; Helen Thomas on Web video From Scripting News to the Washington Post to Tech Crunch Japanese, viewers are tuning in to a video blog soap opera after Amanda Congdon's announcement yesterday that she and Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron have split. The two Rocketboomers put together a huge following over the past two years (international fans: Rocketboom zonder Amanda Congdon... Rocketboom n[base ']est plus[sigma])... followed by lucrative sponsorship deals. Hmm... One now-ironic ad featuring an out-of-work Amanda turning into an ATM-machine-sales superhero... but better offers are rolling in. (Updates: Continued coverage at NYTimes, BaseCamp (video), cnet and elsewhere.) I've been using Rocketboom in class as an example that creative online publishing -- news or not -- doesn't take a studio full of lights, producers and expensive gear. Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron brought the form a daily presence with sex-appeal, personality, humor and a technical edge, but Steve Garfield was the first person I saw exploring what a video blog could be. At Media Giraffe last week he demonstrated just how easy today's tools make "vlogging." In fact, while it's not a video blog, the Media Giraffe wiki now features a video archive of the conference... well worth a visit. No Amanda, but Helen Thomas had plenty to say. 11:28:18 AM

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