First learned about Rocketboom through This Week in Tech’s TWiTcast. In that episode, Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron was (in)famously involved in a rather heated exchange with Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason McCabe Calacanis in which Baron unveiled “plans for world domination” (there was a comparison to Rupert Murdoch).
As it turns out, Baron and Rocketboom partner Amanda Congdon are splitting.
What seems to fascinate people so much about the Rocketboom split is the drama. A bit like “celebrity gossip for the geek crowd.” Learned about the split through CNET’s BuzzOutLoud podcast where they made a passing reference to the notion that the Congdon-Baron duo might have been more than a simple business partnership.
Congdon posted on her own blog both a video about the split and a commented email exchange with Baron. The same Calacanis who was having that exchange with Baron on TWiT has blogged about the Rocketboom split (and followed up with another entry teasing Baron).

Already, some are thinking about TikiBarTV‘s LaLa as a replacement for Congdon.

Some, like the BuzzOutLoud cast, are trying to think about the implications for what Tim O’Reilly calls “Web 2.0.” Can vlogging, vidcasting, and other forms of content distribution still work? How is it that just a few individuals in the United States can have such a big impact on such a broad phenomenon?
In a way, the whole situation might generate a lot of “buzz” for Rocketboom which already had a fairly big audience. So this “geek buzz” might make vlogging more similar to television in the United States. Some (especially in the U.S., one might guess) could see the transformation as a way for vlogging to become a viable business model while others (possibly outside of the U.S. “mediascape”) might deplore the transformation of free, open, and community-oriented models of content distribution into generic “mass media.”

On the other hand, this might be a way for the aforementioned “geek crowd” to assess itself as an important part of U.S. popular culture.

Ah, well…