WebbAlert, a new daily (Monday – Thursday) video news show hosted by X-Play’s Morgan Webb, launches this morning at 2 am PST. The focus of the show will be the major breaking technology and gaming news of the day. Like Rocketboom, each show will be no more than 5 minutes long, for easy consumption. Unlike Rocketboom, I’ve been able to sit through a whole episode – the early content that I’ve seen, including the pilot, is interesting and compelling.
Webb, who’s 28, has the on-air confidence of Lindsay Cambell from Wallstrip, and enough technical knowledge to do a fairly deep dive into the subjects she’s discussing. She has a degree in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley and was a web developer for a while after college. As an aside, she’s also fairly hot – Webb’s pictures have been in FHM and Maxim magazine, and in April she was voted the 51st sexiest woman in the world in a FHM survey.
Webb also “gets” how new media sites gain quick traction by embracing the community. The show will focus on tech and gaming news and will be featuring blog posts that break and cover the news over traditional news outlets. That will put her in the good graces of the bloggers, who will be more likely to link to the show over time.
This is mostly a one-woman show. Webb writes, creates and produces the content, even doing her own camera work. She works out of her at-home studio. Her husband Rob Reid (founder of Listen.com, exec at Rhapsody) is co-founder and handles the business side of things.
WebbAlert has not raised capital, and the show’s very low cost basis means they don’t necessarily have to, either. This could be a winner – blogs will want to get mentions on WebbAlert and, as with TechMeme, will see it as a badge of honor.
The first episode is embedded below.
http://p.castfire.com/cHNHf/video/1812/webbalert_2007-08-02-024247.flv
Update: I should have mentioned the excellent TeXtra videocast in the post as well, since it in a very similar format. It’s hosted by Natalie Del Conte, a former TechCrunch writer, and covers very similar news items as WebbAlert. A key difference is that while TeXtra is also almost certainly sourcing its stories from blogs, they are rarely (never?) credited, giving bloggers little incentive to watch or link to it. I think the slight tweak that WebbAlert gave the model is going to work out very well for them. And perhaps Natalie will begin to add sources to the stories she talks about as well.