Dan Romero

I figured that I would resolve some housekeeping business with a post:

• Facebook does have some RSS - I stand corrected. After complaining about Facebook's lack of RSS a few weeks ago, I discovered today that your notifications can be read as an RSS. Unfortunately, I already get most important notifications sent to my mobile via SMS. This also doesn't address the Newsfeed RSS problem either.
• Wider blog design - Unlike the NYTimes, which seems to be getting more narrow every time I visit (more on this in a later post), I increased the width of the blog by about 60 pixels. The non-designers reading won't care, but I did this to increase my line lengths.
• New domain names - So I now have a whole bunch of domain names that I own: danielwromero.com, blazamos.com, dratius.com, coupondj.com, he.rodot.us, milliondollarhillary.com, feehanbooks.com. And now I have two more: danromero.tv and kville.tv. What they will be use for, that's still up in the air.
• Upcoming birthday - A much less pertinent piece of info, I will be turning 20 on the 12th. Scary.
• iPhone typing speed - I have been using the iPhone for over a month now and I just want to say that I can type very fast on the keyboard (with thanks to the auto-correction software). I will be doing a complete "one month after" analysis sometime next week.
• Next week - Expect some posts about Twitter/Pownce/Facebook next week. I also think a post about the new MMOG company Multiverse and Indiana University's The Synthetic Worlds Initiative. Exciting stuff.

This morning Techcrunch profiled a new video blog, WebbAlert, a Web 2.0 news show hosted by TechTV's Morgan Webb. The article's title, "WebbAlert: A Lot Like Rocketboom, Except It's Interesting," makes an interesting comparison between the new show and the popular video blog Rocketboom. Arrington also compares Webb's "on-air confidence" to that of Lindsey Campbell from Wallstrip.

It is both easy and hard to compare WebbAlert to Rocketboom. Both, as well as Wallstrip, are hosted by attractive, witty young women - appealing to the mainly male dominated worlds of technology and Wall Street. And other than the fact that both are video blogs focusing on the internet, the comparison doesn't extend any further.

WebbAlert covers daily Web 2.0 news whereas Rocketboom tends to find stories that are less time-sensitive and more focused on web culture and funny stories. To make a comparision to traditional television, Rocketboom is the Dailey Show; WebbAlert is the nightly news.

Arrington also thinks that WebbAlert is far more interesting than Rocketboom. Considering it takes less than a minute to scan Techmeme and 5 minutes to watch an episode of WebbAlert, I think the only advantage the show has is the anchor. Rocketboom on the other hand has funnier, undiscovered content. Just today they covered the Duke students in Berlin at the startup shoeboxed.

Changing focus slightly, I find it quite interesting that most of the major video blogs, Rocketboom, Wallstrip, JetSet (from the people behind Rocketboom) all have female anchors. Besides the obvious reasons that web geeks enjoy watching women rather than men deliver their tech news and pop culture, it is interesting that anchorwomen are dominating this space. It was only last year that the major networks had their first anchorwoman, Katie Couric, host the nightly news. But according to the Boston Globe, the number of male newscasters on traditional TV is at an all-time low.

On a final note, I have tried my hand at a WebbAlert-style show: the Web 3.0 Report with Dan Romero (pilot episode). I thought it was kind of cool. But unfortunately, audiences don't find me as fun to look at while I am talking about the latest and greatest on the web.