Rocketboom
From Wikiboom, the official Rocketboom wiki
Rocketboom is a three-minute daily videoblog which is often presented in the format of a newscast, usually with a comedic slant. It is hosted and anchored by former MTV Europe VJ Joanne Colan. Rocketboom has been produced and directed by Andrew Baron since he launched the site in October 2004.
Rocketboom is available on the website, Akimbo, Democracy, and via an RSS 2.0 feed. Viewers may subscribe to feeds using a podcast aggregator such as Juice or iTunes, which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically. In addition to TiVo, it is also available on Windows Media Center with a third party plug-in from mcesoft.
Rocketboom's opening theme music is "Zoom a Little Zoom", from the 1959 album Space Songs written by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer, a public domain recording because of a lapsed copyright. The theme is sung by folk musician Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans with music by Tony Mottola.
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[edit] People
Rocketboom and Rocketboom Human Wire's World Video Report (humanwire.org) both present webcasts packaged by its correspondents in the United States, Europe and Kenya
- Annie, Los Angeles (blog)
- Andy Carvin, Boston (blog)
- Zadi Diaz, Los Angeles (blog)
- Ruud Elmendorp, Nairobi (blog)
- Steve Garfield, Boston (blog)
- Milt Lee, South Dakota (blog)
- Chuck Olsen, Minneapolis (blog)
- Bre Pettis, Seattle (blog)
- Tyson Root, Houston (blog)
- Stefan M. Seydel, Switzerland/Germany/Austria (blog)
- Graham Walker, Prague (blog).
Other members on the Rocketboom team have included Kevin Chapados (video editor) and Sherng-Lee Huang (video editor and field reporter), plus Joshua Kinberg and Kenyatta Cheese. Rocketboom is not what is use to be...
[edit] Format
Each weekday morning, Rocketboom offers oddities and assorted animations, reports on robotics, unveils digital delights, samples vlog excerpts and explores emerging social movements, such as freeganism and parkour, while sometimes presenting political commentary, satiric or serious. Apart from an occasional use of old newsreel footage or vintage commercials, the much-touted products of traditional mainstream media seldom get a mention. Instead, the thrust of Rocketboom is very much allied with Internet culture and personalities. Baron's survey of Internet amusements is ongoing and vast in scope, as indicated by the many links he has posted at Rocketboom's associated sites, the Rocketboom weblog and Apollo Pony, repositories of material that does or does not make it onto Rocketboom's daily webcasts.
[edit] Popularity
When Rocketboom debuted in 2004, it went from an initial 700 viewers to 70,000 viewers in its first ten months. The vlog's success has been noted by CBS Evening News [1], Wired News [2], BusinessWeek [3], and others. The January 9, 2006 issue of Newsweek stated that Rocketboom had 130,000 daily viewers.
On Feburary 2, 2006 Rocketboom was incorporated into an episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in a fictional scene of a murderer watching a Rocketboom commentary on the crime (mov, flash). In the month following the CSI episode, the number of Rocketboom viewers jumped to 200,000. As noted by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times in March 2006, this is similar to the size of a small cable show audience. [4]
By the spring of 2006, Rocketboom was receiving a minimum of 250,000 complete downloads per day. Over the course of several days, each day's video receives over 300,000 complete downloads. Some episodes are more popular and receive well over a million complete downloads [5].
In April and May 2006, Rocketboom introduced its first commercials. The first commercial sponsors were TRM and Earthlink. [6]. Each of which was a series of 5 commercials shown, one per day, over the week that they were featured.
