Rocketboom and WebbAlert: apples and oranges
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.
