Mahalo Daily » Blog Archive » Hello world!
Nice pastiche (in both senses of the term). A hodge-podge imitation/parody of some of the most prominent video podcasts of the last few years.
But:
- Don’t we get to vote?
- Where’s Tiki Bar TV???
Tag Archives: Rocketboom
Sizing Up the Geek Crowd
Rocketboom interview with Steve Rubel
Like Delagrave and Bergeron, Rubel got it. And it goes much beyond marketing, brands, or even economy. Geeks are at the forefront of something. They have an impact. Not a direct impact on sales of a specific product. But geeks are trailblazers and, sometimes, trendsetters in the social changes which are already happening. They’re not causing the change. But they’re riding the waves of social change. Some waves will die quickly, others will carry many people to an interesting place. As in STF, creating windmills, not shelters.
This is also connected to a recent discussion I had, at a nice brewpub, with a member of Siebel Institute’s faculty. We were talking about beer geeks and their impact on craft beer sales. Not only are beer geeks like computer geeks but it turns out that there might be a clear historical relation between the Pacific Coast computer industry, the rise of latte drinking, and the craft beer revolution. As beer and coffee are among my passions, I find this link fascinating.
At any rate, this faculty member’s point was that large breweries shouldn’t care much about beer geeks as they (we) don’t drive sales of specific products. One of the main arguments here is that geeks aren’t faithful to a brand. Geeks want diversity. Beer geeks want as many different beers as possible.
It’s pretty much the same thing throughout the geek crowd. Talk about empowered “consumers”…
Shaving Seconds
Today’s Rocketboom episode (for casual Friday, July 21, 2006) is about a method to tie shoelaces and the benefits of shaving two seconds off some tasks.
For someone who likes to take his time rapidly instead of hurrying slowly, it still fits in my way to do things. For instance, finding the right door to exit at a metro/subway station often means that you can catch a bus just before it leaves, especially if you run up the stairs in the station (as long as nobody’s in front of you).
Yeah, just the silly little things that make life funny.
Tikiboom, RocketBarTV
The latest Rocketboom episode is a cross-over with TikiBarTV. With speculation that LaLa might have been considered as a replacement for Amanda Congdon, the cross-referencing is even more likely to generate buzz.
Yes, as many have been saying, the new personalized/community-oriented syndicated online distribution systems for content (all these “Web 2.0” things based on versions of RSS and Atom) like blogs, podcasts, and vidcasts/vlogs are like an “echo chamber” or some other metaphor about self-referential, inward-looking, insular communities with rather high clustering coefficient. Cliques, so to speak. But not really elitist per se. And, in fact, not at all close-ended. Just groups which are their own little universe.
Changes in the Vlogosphere
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…