ON SCOBLE BEING UNBOOMED

LOWERING THE BOOM

Update:  The New York Times has deemed this story worthy of mainstream coverage today.

GEEK ALERT:  The subject of this post is going to be of interest to Blogging geeks only.  Mainstream readers may want to skim or pass.

Judging from the top stories on Techmeme, Blog geeks have been in a supreme tizzy over the last couple of days, over the apparent split between Rocketboom co-founders Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon.

The focus is on the soap-opera style split between the executive producer and the online face of Rocketboom, a popular video blog of late. 

Almost every notable A-list blogger has commented on this kerfuffle, including Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, and Jason Calacanis (who's made Amanda a job offer at the new Netscape/AOL).

Reading Amanda's post on the conflict, the issue on the surface seems to be whether Amanda and Rocketboom can re-locate to Los Angeles from New York Times.

But it may be something as simple as her Partner wanting to replace her with someone else.

Stowe Boyd suggests it might be Amber MacArthur, host of TechTV.

Robert Scoble has some other possibilities in mind:

"Well, why not start speculation about who’ll take Rocketboom over?

Will it be Bethany of RealVerse?
Or Laura and Tina of On10?
Irina of GeekEntertainment TV?
Cali of GeekBrief.tv?
Amber of TWiT.tv?
Jason and Nate of the Bleeding Edge?
Sas and Pauline of TrueGritz?"

Even the mainstream press is taking notice of all this hub-bub, judging from these pieces in the Washington Post and BusinessWeek.

However this situation turns out, there's no question it's been great PR for the principals in this drama.

But for me the best thing to come out of this commotion over Amanda being "Unboomed", is that we may have a new word to potentially enter the English language.

Very appropriate that it should happen at the very time that "Google" officially becomes a word in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.

And the first non-Amanda use of the word "Unboomed"? 

Well, it comes from Scoble of course, in the following, hilarious post, titled "A new marital threat":

"Maryam (Robert's wife) wants me to get my hands off of the computer and go out with her and do some chores. I’ve been delaying, answering email and blogging and stuff like that. So, she got a little mad and said:

“I’m going to unboom you if you don’t get down here right now.”

OK, that worked. See ya all later."

Robert, I can totally relate...we don't want the bloom to come off the marital rose now, do we?

P.S.

Did anyone notice that the map of the world that Amanda typically has on Rocketboom as background (see first picture on left), is UPSIDE DOWN in the video where she announces that she's leaving Rocketboom?

Talk about staging things well in the midst of a "crisis".

Comments

[Wyatt williams]

However this situation turns out,
I suppose that..

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Now, there is a contest. I would vote for Rachel of 88Slide.
http://www.88slide.com/

[Joshua]

However this situation turns out,