Second Life Future Salon: Rocketboom's Amanda Congdon @ the June 30th Second Life Future Salon

Got vlog (Wikipedia def)? Yes/No? Well check out the daily video blog www.rocketboom.com. I'll be interviewing Rocketboom anchor Amanda Congdon (pictured above with a face for all seasons :-) at the next Second Life Future Salon, happening June 30th at 3:30 PM PST in the virtual world of Second Life.

Yes, Amanda will don an avatar and join us in SL to shoot the breeze on vlogging, media landscape shtuff, transparency and whatever else comes up between us and the merry salon rabble. Please send me questions you'd like asked and RSVP your attendance to jerrypaffendorf(at)accelerating(dot)org. For those of you without Second Life accounts, you can sign-up for 10 bucks on www.secondlife.com and we'll also be streaming this event live online in a Quicktime format. Stay tuned here or join the Yahoo! group for the URL.

See more about Amanda (who you may recognize from the second season of the NBC's, The Restaurant) at www.amandacongdon.com, and check out her personal vlog, Amanda UnBoomed. I suggest finding out why the Volvo is cool.

I first heard of Rocketboom when Make Magazine posted a podcast interview with Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron, and it's since become a three minute staple of my daily media diet. If you're new to it, you can get your catch-up fix by digging through the archive. To experience the range of Rocketboom, from wacky to informative to serious, I recommend checking out the dummy dancer, her interview with John Edwards, and her expose on a case of police brutality. Quite the spread.

And for those of you who like to do your homework before the salons, "Continue reading" for some Rocketboom-related links, including interviews and news articles.

•'Rocketboom' May Be Future of TV News, from ABC News
•Corante Feedfest video interview
•video of SXSW vlog panel w/ Rocketboom creator Andrew Baron

Jake Ludington's blog says it pretty well: "We didn't get to see the news anchor skills of Dennis Miller and Jon Stewart when they were starting out, but it's safe to assume they both honed their abilities long before they ever made it to television. If the Web were a major distribution mechanism during the formative years of either guy, they might have been doing something like RocketBoom. Amanda Congdon does a daily short film of news across the Web, anchor desk style. Her opinions are humorous with an occasional left-leaning political slant and her deadpan delivery is downright hilarious at times. She finds the popular video shorts circulating the Web and works them into her daily video the same way a news anchor would cut to a clip during the course of a "real" news program."

That sounds about right. See you at the salon!