Former Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon gets profiled in the New York Times, and somehow the NYT doesn’t even cough up a link to her new video blog, Sometimes Daily.

“It’s weird,” says Congdon.

The Times article also seems fairly dismissive of everything that Congdon has done:

Ms. Congdon, 26, became the closest thing to an Internet sensation by hosting “Rocketboom,” one of the first Web video series to become a breakout hit. But since she departed the show in 2006, her attempts to go mainstream have largely fallen flat.

She signed a development deal with HBO, but nothing came of it. She joined ABC News to produce eccentric newscasts, but she clashed with the culture there and exited quietly last fall. And she established a production company but remained largely offline for months.

Now Ms. Congdon, feeling a little burned by big media, is back blogging and hosting and producing. Working with the independent production studio Media Rights Capital, she is reintroducing herself on “Sometimes Daily,” an irregular look at life through Ms. Congdon’s eyes.

While Congdon’s attempts to go mainstream may have dead-ended, this is probably as much of a failure of mainstream media as it is of Congdon.

Newspapers are tanking. Television is tanking.

If traditional media companies want to have a future, they need to figure out how to either create new Internet media celebrities or build on the successes of people like Congdon.

JVC has introduced it’s take on the “YouTube camcorder” – the JVC GZ-MS100:

The JVC GZ-MS100 connects directly to your computer, via USB. Clicking the camera’s built-in Upload button will send videos directly to YouTube. The JVC GZ-MS100 features a 2.7-inch LCD, 35x optical zoom, auto backlight control, Cyberlink software, and a battery that should give you two hours of recording time on a charge. Also, interestingly enough, the camcorder will only recorder videos up to 10 minutes, matching YouTube’s upload limits.

Making camcorders Internet-friendly is going to be a huge trend; the YouTube-ready Pure Digital Flip camcorder came from nowhere to rapidly capture 17 percent of the digital camcorder market.

With a name like “JVC GZ-MS100” and a price of $349.99, the new camcorder doesn’t look like a Flip-killer.

I’d like to see camcorder makers work on simplifying video publishing to WordPress and Movable Type blogs, too. While YouTube has huge numbers, there are a millions of bloggers that aren’t publishing videos because it’s still too complicated.

via Gearlog

It looks like mainstream broadcasters will have to come to terms with YouTube, video podcasts and other Internet media or they’ll face the same fate as newspapers.

TVWeek reports that this year’s May television ratings sweeps are a debacle:

Low ratings during the February sweeps may have been a fluke due to the writers strike, but the May sweeps period is painting a picture of viewers out of sync with broadcast television: Shows across multiple networks rang up series lows during a time that historically lures in the viewers.

On average, the networks are off the mark by 10% from last year in total viewers and off 17% in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

Consistently performing shows like AB’Cs Grey’s Anatomy, NBC’s Deal or No Deal and Fox’s The Simpsons garnered ratings near or at their series lows in the 18-49 demo during this May sweeps period, which began April 24 and ends May 21.

The sweeps period is important in determining ad rates for TV stations, and lower viewership might send ad buyers looking elsewhere, including cable and the Internet.

We’ve said it before: “new media” is now mainstream media. Viewers, especially young viewers, are ready for Internet television, on their terms.

There’s no network Internet video offering yet that offers viewers a palatable option for viewing long-form video. The closest is probably Hulu, which tries to make guys watch half a dozen ads for feminine products in the course of one show.

If that’s the best broadcasters can do in this day and age, they deserve to lose 10%, or more, of their audience.

Videographer is a free WordPress theme for creating video sites.

“It’s a great way to build content-rich niche sites, and use the power of YouTube at the same time,” says creator Shane Navratil.

To use it, you’ll need to know WordPress, some HTML and possibly some php. No support is provided for the theme.

There’s been some discussion in the last few days about so-called “blogging 2.0”.

Here are a couple of quotes that explain the “new paradigm of blogging 2.0”.

via The Inquisitr:

If blogging 1.0 was about enabling the conversation on each blog, blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services. The conversation has matured and no longer is it acceptable to believe that as a content owner you hold exclusive domain over conversations you have started. Users/ readers today demand more than a conversation on one site, and blogging 2.0 facilitates this.

via Louis Gray:

Blogging 1.0 centered around who could:

• Amass the most page views
• Display the most ads
• Get the most comments
• Attract the most RSS subscribers

But then came along some inconvenient wrinkles to the mix:

• Full RSS feeds took page views away from the blog
• Readers installed ad filters, and didn’t click
• Comments started to live elsewhere
• Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories

The world of blogging has changed. Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it’s hard to understand for those who’ve always accepted things for what they are.

Call me blogtarded, but this “blogging 2.0” idea seems to be missing the most basic thing that has made the growth of blogging and Internet media interesting: the Internet is unrelentingly lowering the barriers to content publishing, to the point that it is becoming trivial to publish content.

You Can Do It

The fundamental idea of blogging is that You can do it.

You can go to a website, register and be blogging 5 minute later. You can install WordPress on a cheap Web hosting service and create your own site.

The same idea is central to podcasting. You can use a microphone and Garageband and podcast to the world. You can use your video camera, or even the camera built into your computer, to create a vlog or video podcast.

When people talk about blogging being about getting the most page views, getting the most comments or displaying the most ads, they are missing the point. Worrying about page views and ad views are traditional media concerns, and are not things that differentiate blogging.

And you have to wonder if we should be navel-gazing about “blogging 2.0”, when 55 million people in the US alone haven’t even caught up with “email 1.0”.

Blogging, vlogging and podcasting are still too hard for most people, and that makes the Internet a lot less interesting than it could be.

What makes blogging and podcasting interesting is that you can do it. You can make the “long tail” longer.

And when you make the long tail longer, that means there’s more tail for everybody. (Or something like that!)

Image: Márcio Cabral de Moura

If you’ve ever wondered why technologies popular with first adopters, like podcasting or Twitter, are adopted more slowly by general users, you don’t have to look much further than the latest research from Parks Associates.

They found that roughly one-fifth of all U.S. heads-of-household have never used e-mail.

Their annual phone survey of U.S. households found 20 million households, about 18% of all US households, are without Internet access. That’s about 55 million people in the US that don’t have Internet access at home.

It’s easy to lose site of this world, if you’ve been on the Internet for 10 year or if you’ve grown up using the Internet. To those without Internet access, getting your news from the Web, texting people around the world or creating and sharing your own Internet media are foreign.

“Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document,” said John Barrett, director, research, Parks Associates. “These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer.

Here are the details:

The stars & creators of the latest Indiana Jones movie answered questions today via the microvlogging community Seesmic.

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur explains:

The original idea was to have journalists around the World ask private questions to the actors and they would answer in private, as a way to give access to them. Instead of a fully private interview, most of the conversation has been public during about two hours but there were also many private videos which were posted and answered by journalists.

This experience illustrates how video on the net and Seesmic can be a fantastic way to get our community closer to celebrities and ask them questions directly. They would not have accepted live and the asynchroneous Seesmic format worked very well. They took many more questions from journalists that they would have in face to face as Seesmic passwords were distributed to journalists around the world.

It’s an interesting experiment, and one that is likely to bring a tremendous amount of awareness to the Seesmic community.

Here are links to the participants:

• Steven Spielberg
• Harrison Ford
• George Lucas
• Shia Laboeuf here and here
• Karen Allen here and here
• Cate Blanchett here, here, here and here

via Loic Le Meur

blubrry‘s Todd Cochrane announced today that his company was removing more than a hundred podcasts from its service and banning sites because of problems with “podspam”:

This morning I instructed our CIO to have all shows that were using a RSS Feed generation service hosted by trafficgeyser.net and mypodfeeds.com to be terminated here at Blubrry.com

From this point forward we will no longer allow accounts from those two services. Content creators must choose wisely on the service that they align themselves with. I felt that service hurt the Blubrry brand and service we are trying to provide here.

This decision was made after several weeks of evaluation, what we found was that the very high majority of shows using those services had content that we felt in large part was not appropriate for the listeners visiting this website.

The majority of the shows were non compliant with our terms of service and the content was for the most part marketing pitches for their websites our services. Additionally the high majority of the shows did not have complete profiles and by their show profiles it was obvious that their sole purpose of being here was to build page rank and drive traffic to their content.

While we will work with any show that feels their content should not have been removed please recognize that we have done this to protect Blubrry Listeners and the other content creators that are part of this community.

We have never taken this action at Blubrry.com and hopefully never will have to again in the future. We have implemented a new strict review policy in order to protect the content creators on this website.

Unfortunately, as the marketability of podcasting rises, interest from spammers appears to be rising, too, and spamcasts may become more of a problem.

See our recent interview with Todd Cochrane for his take on problems with the current state of podcast feeds.

Video Elements is a commercial WordPress theme designed for video sites.

Video Elements lets you your videos in two different ways, including the “Instant View” which allows users to instantly view any video on your site by selecting the video thumbnail, and within the single post page where the video is featured above your post description.

The Video Elements theme has been tested on WordPress versions 2.3 and 2.5 only. The theme has been tested  with FireFox, IE6.0, IE7.0, Safari and Opera.

A license is $25, and requires that you leave a credit link in the foter.

Mobile broadcast network FlyTunes has added video and audio podcasts to its offerings, in addition to a new user interface and a customizable channel guide.

The new video and audio channels cover a wide range of topics, including news, entertainment, politics, kids & family, health, comedy, business and technology. FlyTunes now offers users over 350 channels of music, talk, video and podcast entertainment choices.

FlyTunes is also releasing a new user interface that lets users quickly find and select desired channels from two simple dialog boxes. Each selected channel now displays more detailed information, including an SMS text message link to allow users to send friends a direct link to listen in.

The new MyGuide feature allows users to personalize their mobile media experience by enabling or disabling individual channels and even entire genres from the selection menu.

Note that FlyTunes is at FlyTunes.fm, not .com.