Reflection on vlog Rocketboom

There’s a ton of articles about the vlog Rocketboom. It’s a five-days-a-week take on technology, Internet culture, viral video and pretty much anything else that catches the fancy of the small staff.

Anywho, there’s a lot of articles about the meteoric rise of the video blog and its host Amanda Congdon. Some articles, including one in a national journalism magazine, are pretty interesting to read. Some writers speculate that thousands of these blogs may overwhelm national broadcast news.

I certainly see that being possible given how fragmented our media landscape has become with increasing diversity in both the high-price mass media and the other venues (such as the Internet). I’m simultaneously elated and sad because as it becomes easier to disseminate a message, the mass audience grows more diffuse.

The whole point is this — with all the questions about the importance of Rocketboom, it seems that not even its partner TiVo knows how to describe the program. In its “Now Playing” section on my TiVo box, Rocketboom is listed as having “Quality: Unknown”. It refers to the image quality, but it might open a box of other questions too.