Since I discovered Rocketboom on September 27, 2005, I had not missed an episode until they changed formats to the wide screen hd format. After that I found the video so choppy and the sound so broken that I had to quit watching. Yesterday I tried again and was pleasantly surprised to find that every played smoothly. I don’t know if RB changed something or if my Quicktime upgrade fixed things or perhaps Comcast cleared up some noise on the line. I’m returning to my daily 3 minutes of Amanda Congdon.
Oh, I should clarify why I watch Rocketboom. A friend of mine said, "I don’t get what [Doug] sees in Rocketboom" and went on to conjecture that perhaps I was hot for Amanda. Actually, Amanda frequently reminds me of my sister so the whole being hot for her would be a bit yucky. I’m hot for Cathy. I find the Rocketboom format to be intriguing. It is not so long as to feel like I’ve wasted time. The stories are just the right length providing enough detail to be amusing or interesting without dragging on. When I want more, the story is linked to more detail and does not open in a new window (I often go to the story and still return to RB contrary to the fear of most designers that "if you send the user away from your site, you won’t get them back" which leads to popup windows or frames). The video is high quality and well edited. The stories are typically ahead of msm, digg (but not long ahead), and some of the other hot spots. Long and short, it is the content and the format of the program that grabs me.
I enjoy the fact that RB finds obscure internet bits that I can enjoy without having to hunt down myself.
[…] Remember how I used to talk up Rocketboom? Since discovering it on September 27, 2005 I didn’t miss a show until… I have yet to be able to watch Rocketboom again. I now suspect my Linksys router is the problem. […]