A Museum-Ready Collection of Videobloggers
Remember when Amanda Congdon was rocketing to the top? Yeah, me neither. Videoblogging's forgotten stars.
The Decline and Fall of Robert Scoble
Ignored in high school, the geek princes of social media now thrive on attention from eager fanboys (and calculating flacks). Relentless Fast Company egoblogger Robert Scoble was their king. Until he got dethroned.
Shira Lazar, Kevin Rose's Latest Fling
Having famously "plowed through" San Francisco's eligible bachelorettes, Digg founder Kevin Rose went L.A. for his most recent paramour, Shira Lazar. Who is this Web-video wannabe with links to Dov Charney and Julia Allison?
Since when do Japanese pornographers pay tech podcasters six figures?
Video-sharing site Stickam — owned and operated by a Japanese porn company — wants to pay some guy named Leo Laporte $100,000 to stream his podcast called This Week in Tech, or TWiT, exclusively for one year. Confused? So are we. And when we did the math, our bewilderment grew.
Sarah Atwood has my vote for Mahalo Daily Idol
The clock is ticking down to Saturday's open casting call to fill the role of Mahalo Daily host. The job, formerly held by Veronica Belmont, is to serve as the pretty face for Jason Calacanis's site that's trying to cash in on top search terms. I'll go ahead and endorse Nerdtainment's Sarah Atwood. Am I just…
The triumphant nonreturn of Amanda Congdon
Thank goodness! Just a day after our missing-persons alert on former videoblogger Amanda Congdon, she turned up on her blog with a 794-word entry she's been working on for a month. Here's a version she could have fit in a Twitter: "I'm going daily on a new videoblog in 2008. I'm in pre-production for the new project…
Whatever happened to Amanda Congdon?
We are growing concerned. After her career as an ABC nonjournalist fizzled, the formerly famous, generously-racked host of Rocketboom has been absent from her own blog since November 27. An "under development "show with HBO has gone nowhere. On January 23, Congdon Twittered that she was "writing monster blog post…
Facebook dumper may have staged Digg-linked hack
Sandra Soroka, the New York videoblogger who dumped her boyfriend through her Facebook status message may not have had her Flickr account hacked by outraged Digg users, as we previously reported. Some now suggest she staged the hack, hoping it would stem the tide of invective flooding her Facebook inbox, according…
Natali Del Conte heads for New York
We've always known Natali Del Conte, the host of Podshow's TeXtra, was destined for a bigger stage. And she's found one in a new gig at CNET — in New York City. In addition to online video for CNET, she'll be making the rounds of television shows like Good Morning America to explain gadgets and websites to the…
Rocketboom creator takes on Calacanis
Jason Calacanis's human-powered search engine Mahalo is "fundamentally flawed," says videoblogger Andrew Baron. Well, we could have told you that: It's basically Yahoo's directory, 12 years too late. But Baron, best known for creating Rocketboom, trashed Calacanis's service not for its lack of originality, but for…
"Veronica Belmont is a 'Rojas-level' hire"
How high is Jason Calacanis on his new videoblogger? "Veronica Belmont is a Rojas-level hire," he reportedly told groupies who showed up for a dim sum dinner in New York's Chinatown yesterday. That may sound like praise for Belmont, the videoblogger he hired away from CNET. But it's really more egotism. The thing…
Videoblogger to Mahalo's rescue!
Calacanis realizes that if search isn't putting butts in Aeron seats, he can always try to boost geeky traffic with popular entertainment. He lays this strategy bare by orchestrating the amusing Belmont through an unamusing series of popular video show parodies: Ze Frank, Rocketboom, Ask a Ninja, Tay Zonday,…
Valley geeks vote on their own unfulfilled libidos
New voting site Dig a Silicon Valley Girl has reached the pinnacle of loser-generated content. It makes the implicit explicit — the sex-starved id of the male-dominated Valley made tangible in a thoroughly useless, if entertainingly revealing site. DSVG recycles the social voting of Digg, mixes it with rating site…
Scobleizer says shutdown rumor is "bull####"
Robert Scoble, the king of mindless time-wasting afternoon desktop entertainment — at least for me — blogs a denial of senior Forbes staffer Dan Lyons's claim that PodTech, Scoble's employer, is shutting down soon. As Scobleizer correctly fumes, had Lyons posted the rumor for his mag instead of on his semi-fictional…
Natali Del Conte makes a cute mistake
What is more appealing to the predominantly male tech audience than a hot girl talking tech in a video podcast? A hot girl making silly mistakes, of course. Grown men love to ogle hot girls making silly mistakes. "Oops, she's so cute." We're not saying it's good, or right, or proper. We're just saying that at the…
Boing Boing to launch daily Internet-TV show
Is any blogger still satisfied with merely blogging? The quirky alternative website Boing Boing, which claims 7.5 million monthly viewers, will debut a daily online video show Wednesday. After closet negotiations with national networks, the Boing Boingers decided to go it alone and own the show themselves. But this…
Amanda Congdon bounces back with best video ever
There's the fact that it's an old joke. That it's mostly humorous because Congdon is usually incapable of humor. That I laughed because she is defying her image as a vacuous, uninteresting shill attempting to make her way in the world of "legitimate journalism." That lightning doesn't strike twice. On second thought,…
