Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Rocket-ka-boom!

Uh oh:

Amanda Congdon has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.

We wanted to meet her demands to move production out to L.A., however, we are a small company and have not been able to figure out a way to make it work, financially and in many other ways at this time. While we continue to remain with open arms, Amanda has in fact quit and left Rocketboom. So sadly, we bid Amanda adieu and wish her all the best.

Amanda’s sad goodbye is here. The transcript is here. Andrew Baron’s response is here. (He says he first heard she was leaving in her video.)

Jason Calacanis wants to hire her over at Netscape, “You’re a star baby… it’s time to be treated like one.” She certainly appears to have acted like one, a petulant one at that.

Om says she should go to Podtech with Scoble. Scoble says, “It’s clear that Amanda and Andrew are in pretty deep pain… I’m saddened by this, and offer my support for whatever path Amanda and Andrew take in the future.”

I’m with Dave Winer leaning towards Andrew’s side. I may just be the one Rocketboom fan enamored more with the show than Amanda. It certainly sounds like she’ll be fine.

The best analysis so far is from Steve Safran at Lost Remote. He’s not buying the NY to LA story, “They could have easily worked out a system, fast, ...After all, Johnny Carson moved the entire production of “The Tonight Show” from New York to Los Angeles without missing a beat.”

He’s guessing it’s ego and money and says the best hope for Rocketboom is to “re-brand itself in a new direction. Simply replacing Amanda would be a disaster.”

My favorite comment:

The web shouldn’t be an auditioning ground for TV. It should have its own stars who stay true to the medium and earn their riches that way. Forget about web stars going to TV; I predict it will go the other way soon.

His conclusion:

As in most divorces and band breakups, Amanda and Andrew both lose in this fight. They will both find future success. But McCartney’s songs without Lennon were too mushy, David Gilmour without Roger Waters is too ponderous, and Rocketboom without Amanda will be a mere bottle rocket.

I’ll be interested to see what Andrew Baron does; Scoble should go after him.

LATER: More from Amanda; persuasively more.

FINAL UPDATE: New “girl” chosen. That was fast.

Everything new is old again

Romenesko:

Five of the seven nominees for the so-called emerging media Emmy are reports done by websites of the New York Times or the Washington Post. “Newspapers, I think have always wished they could be in television, but they didn’t have a television network,” says Av Westin, co-chairman of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ news and documentary awards committee. “Now they essentially have one: it’s called the web.”

I felt something similar when Rocketboom covered The Webby Awards. Thomas Friedman was named Person of the Year; Prince got a lifetime achievement award; Arianna won something. It all felt too wannabe-star-studded.

Garrison on Ralph

Garrison Keillor on Ralph Reed in Salon:

If a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and so Ralph Reed’s political career is still alive and breathing in Georgia. He has bathed himself in tomato juice and hopes to smile his way through the storm.

The facts are fairly simple. Mr. Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997 as it was sinking, and he was paid by Jack Abramoff to organize opposition to a gambling bill in the Texas Legislature, which would have opened the door to competition for Mr. Abramoff’s client casinos in Louisiana. So Reed got the good Christians of Texas ("We have over 50 pastors mobilized, with a total membership in those churches of over 40,000—that includes Second Baptist, which has 12,000 members,” he reported breathlessly) to bombard the Legislature with phone calls and letters denouncing gambling, for which Mr. Reed was paid millions of dollars in gambling money, by way of Abramoff’s bagman, Grover Norquist.

Reed also helped defeat a state lottery and video poker in Alabama, in behalf of casinos in Mississippi. In Alabama, he told Abramoff, he had “over 3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households.” He enlisted these Baptists in a fight against one saloon while he was on the payroll of another.

Imagine if Ralph Nader had solicited money from Ford and Chrysler when he went after General Motors’ Corvair. Or the Southern Baptists raising money from Sony and Universal to condemn movies by MGM.

Who killed the electric car?

We’ve all heard of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Now comes Who Killed the Electric Car?

It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?

If, like me, you live in an area where neither of these films will be playing anytime soon, you can get your green fix online from Treehugger TV.

LATER: Lest I gave the impression that we’re not green around here, I’m guessing Hybrid car sales are as strong here as anywhere. And I spent part of the 4th of July weekend in a “green home” way out in rural GA.

The owner told tales of her good ol’ boy contractor’s reaction to solar tubes skylights and the solar panels in the yard that track the sun. Then she proudly showed that her electric meter was goin backward on that sunny 100 degree day.

Ranking a right?

I don’t think so. The Register:

Google has defended its right to rank web pages in any manner it likes in a groundbreaking court case over its search engine results.

The search giant is being sued in California by a parenting website which claims it lost most of its traffic when its ranking dropped to zero. The site, Kinderstart.com, claims that it was downgraded because it is a competitor to Google. A motion by Google to dismiss the case was heard in California last Friday, where Kinderstart argued that it competed with Google because it also offers a search facility on its site.

Kinderstart claims that its traffic dropped by 70% when its page ranking was set to zero. The site claims that “websites and other users in the public, seeking connections through the search engine, are allegedly restricted in speech, ideas exchange and commerce,” because of Google’s actions, according to a statement from the company’s lawyers, Global Law Group.

Google argued in court that its rankings were opinions and therefore protected by the US constitution’s first amendment, which protects freedom of speech.

I’m not real fond of the notion of ranking as a matter of free speech. On either side. The First Amendment has been pulled and stretched in so many ways that it hardly functions any more as a protection of any individual speech right.

New York gay marriage polls

In an article yesterday saying that the court decision could come today the NYTimes has this:

Even if the court rules that gay and lesbian New Yorkers do not have a state constitutional right to marry their partners, advocates said the litigation - and the attention it has attracted - have moved public opinion closer to their position on the issue.

Polls show a slight rise in the percentage of New Yorkers who favor allowing gay marriage - to just over half - in the last three years, while the percentage opposing it has decreased sharply to just over one-third, advocates said.

The plaintiffs have received friend-of-the-court briefs supporting their position from such establishment groups as the New York City Bar Association, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, dozens of New York law professors (including Mr. Gilles), the American Psychological Association, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a number of religious organizations including Episcopal, United Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Unitarian and Reform Jewish groups.

I’m one of those advocates who believes the more it’s discussed the more public opinion will move in favor of gay marriage.

UPDATE: Now they say it’s either tomorrow or August 23. August 23???