Photo from Wikipedia.com
My colleague Mark Evan's increasingly urgent posts on the Rocketboom saga got me over to the site for the first time in a long time. Hanging out with Toronto bloggers last Saturday night at the AGO Warhol show also contributed to my curiosity as one of Rocketboom's founders was in town telling his side of the story - Congdon up and left, honest. For those of you who have no idea what Rocketboom is, well, here is the Reader's Digest version.

Rockboom is the brainchild of an art school graduate digital guy, Andrew Baron, who had a vision about bringing video to blogs - vlog. Get it? Baron had a casting call and out of some hundreds of hopefuls, Amanda Congdon got the gig as the face of Rocketboom.com. They launched in October of 2004.

Rocketboom became a huge hit with numbers that rivaled cable TV programming. They auctioned off ads on eBay which made the blogosphere love them even more. Then, early this July, when they seemed destined to be the first really big cross-over hit on the Net, Amanda left the show saying she was fired. Ouch.

Mark has followed their trials, tribulations, and public dissings and I now understand why.

Rocketboom.com has been offline for a week or so but today at noon-ish it will rise again with a new anchor in place of Congdon. WIll it work?