Former Rocketboom anchor Amanda Congdon has announced plans to vlog her way across America at a new site, Amanda Across America.

From her Wiki:

As you may know, we will be traveling across the country over the next few weeks. On our way we will visit all kinds of people and places — we may even run into you. So we’ve created this wiki to interact with you.We are asking you, THE FORCE, to suggest points of interest across the USA. We are few and you are a geographically scattered multitude. What is there to see near you? Where would you go if you could? What should we not miss?

We encourage you to link to photos, video, and outside resources. We’d love to meet you, get to know you.

Together we will create a super-awesome interactive guide to America.

You are THE FORCE. And THE FORCE is with us.

Hope to see you soon & thank you in advance for your expert advice.

Mario & Amanda

To subscribe, add this feed URL to your podcast app:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ovlov

The Washington Post is inviting people to create video mashups featuring Post political reporter Dana Milbank. Anyone can download Milbank’s questions as an MPEG2 video clip, and then cut it up, mash it up, even slap it up, flip it, rub it down, as long as it meets their requirements (below).

Earlier in the year, Rocketboom, the popular video blog, asked readers to mashup video of former host Amanda Congdon. The site provided a dinner and a website kit that featured video of Congdon providing half of a conversation.

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Rocketboom has announced that it has signed another sponsor for its daily video blog, the Rechargeable Recycling Battery Corporation.

“Today, I am happy to announce Rocketboom has partnered with the Rechargeable Recycling Battery Corporation to create and run three post-roll ads,” notes show creator Andrew Baron at the Rocketboom blog. “The ads, which will star Joanne, will be released in about one month.”

No numbers were released on the deal, but Rocketboom’s sponsorship page prices the ads starting at $13,000 each.

Rocketboom’s continued success at signing sponsorship deals is a sign of confidence in the show, post Amanda Congdon, and a leading indicator for the potential value of indie vlog content.

Andrew Michael Baron, creator of Rocketboom, talked to the first gathering of the NYVideo vlogger group Wednesday night, July 26,2006, and vlogger Randolfe Wicker captured Baron’s talk:

According to Baron, vloggers have a unique “window of opportunity”; vlogging offers even niche markets a previously impossible worldwide audience; and Rocketboom is just the poster-child for a media no longer monopolized by multi-millionaires.

He announced a new sale of $40,000 for one week’s advertising on his show. He also revealed some of his most personal feelings about the departure of Amanda Congdon, and the effect of Congdon’s leaving Rocketboom.

Early in July, the biggest news in the world of video podcasting and vlogging was Amanda Congdon’s announcement that she could not come to an agreement with partner Andrew Baron over the future of their partnership in Rocketboom, the popular comedy news blog.

The news created an explosion of discussion and interest in Rocketboom. Recently, we reported on the fact that Jason Calacanis Wants to Fight for Amanda Congdon Like a Rabid Dog, that the Rocketboom Split had turned Into Soap Opera, that Rocketbooms’s Andrew Baron Did Over 95% of the Stuff that Amanda Congdon Didn’t Do, and that Valleywag Readers were More Breast-Obsessed than even Slate.

Now, Alexa traffic reports suggest that Rocketboom could be better off with new host Joanne Colan, or at least that the controversy gave the show a kick in the seat:

It’s too early to tell if the huge spike will translate into permanent growth for the site, but traffic from the last week suggest that interest in the site is returning to earlier levels.

via Frank Barnako