Daniel Spisak on Technology

So if you happen to keep up with the Web 2.0 Joneses you might have noticed that Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame has left Rocketboom as of today.

Of course the blogosphere then picked this hot potato of a story right up and ran with it! Lets see who all was talking about this:

My friend Om Malik from GigaOM
Robert Scoble formerly of Microsoft
Dave Winer over at Scripting News
Pete Cashmore at Mashable.com
BL Ochman at whatsnextblog.com
Niall Kennedy’s Weblog
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com
And of course ValleyWag

A bunch of people thought that Amanda should go join Scoble over at his new employer PodTech. Podtech would probably love to have Amanda working for them, but after having gone over Amanda’s resume on her personal website it seems to me that no matter what she does in the realm of podcasting, vloging, video podcasting or whatever Doctorow & Co. want to try coining this week is not going to have the kind of viewership she wants.

Lets be honest here, Rocketboom is hugely popular among the Web 2.0/podcasting savvy people and their friends. However, even with the kinds of numbers I seem to recall Andrew Baron tossing around on the This Week In Tech podcast he participated in recently (Episode #57 I believe it was) those numbers would amount to statistical noise in viewership numbers for a popular television show.

Then Jason Calcanis of Weblogs Inc, a.k.a Engadget fame publicly offered Amanda a spot in his new AOL sponsored heading of the Netscape portal fiefdom. As for Calcanis offering a opening for Amanda to work for AOL under the Netscape brand I think its a desparate grab by Calcanis to make folks at Cnet and elsewhere pay any attention to Netscape still. After all, Calcanis had to copy/mimic Digg 2.0 just to get Cnet to even bother mentioning the name Netscape in a story.

While Netscape would be a step up from Rocketboom in some ways, it would still severly limit Amanda’s potential to gain better visibility as a personality that the average person on the street would recognize which I think might be her reason for wanting to gravitate to Los Angeles. If she was at netscape I feel like she would be the charismatic face plastered over an old and aged portal site that is struggling to find relevance in itself or its audience. After all, why doesn’t AOL just dismantle the Netscape portal and ferry those eyeballs to the more traditional AOL portal style destinations and projects? It makes no sense if you ask me.

I certainly wouldn’t mind Amanda joining us all out here in sunny southern California!

Frankly I think wherever I see Congdon popup next its not going to be online necessarily because the audience is too married to technology. Not that technology is a bad thing mind you, its just that the viewership of a popular video podcast verses that of a popular television show is probably orders of magnitude different.

Now Valleywag claims that the Amanda/Andrew split is about to get ugly. This can already be seen at Amanda’s blog, Amanda Unboomed. In a nutshell it looks like Andrew Barton is not going to come out of this one smelling like roses. It may get ugly for both sides involved, but hopefully not as I would love to see whatever Amanda’s next project turns out to be.