I wasn’t among those who sang Amanda Congdon praises when she parted ways with Rocketboom. With her looks and resume she was destined to land another gig. Her first stop was a boring trip across America interviewing different marginally interesting people — sponsored by Ford, of course — and just never had the quirky appeal of Rocketboom for my taste.

Now she’s got a gig going at ABC News and my friend and fellow podcaster Rob Greenlee notes a glaring omission:

…it is very disappointing that ABC has not surface a Video Podcast feed for her new show. I would like to make it available at Melodeo.com, but it appears that ABC has dropped the ball on the most important piece. Sure it is cool to watch it from ABCNews.com, but her show will not reach its full potential.

So now she’s not only Unboomed, she’s UnRSSed. I love the teaser ‘Talk To Amanda’ text that starts out with the perhaps ill-timed “whip out your …” and then anticlimaxes with “… videocamera.” What a hormone destroyer. We’ll all know Amanda has really hit the big time when Hef asks her to pose nude in Playboy.

In all seriousness, best of luck to Amanda at ABC. She doesn’t know me and I don’t know her, but I sincerely hope she is able to carve out a career in the talent mecca known as Hollywood. Heaven knows if she misses a step, there will be dozens of other pretty — but perhaps not as savvy — talents ready to follow in her footsteps.

Her debut video is … unspectacular
Amanda’s heavily produced and polished (what else?) first video at ABC starts with a [gasp] commercial. Does anybody reading actually like videos that start out with a commercial? Fast forward, fast forward. Put the commercials at the end or better yet: product placement. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out where the best piece of commercial real estate in Amanda’s vlogs are. They could sell both sides too.

Amanda does a signature close-up, abrupt face turn and rips on “the whole javascript thing” (the video opens in a popup, bummer #2). Overall, a luke warm first showing content-wise, nothing ground breaking. I’m sure they’ll gather more steam in future vids, but they need to fix the missing feed ASAP if they want to capitalize on any of Amanda’s old RB audience. I doubt even her most ardent fans are going to want to keep refreshing the ABC page looking for new vids.

I know, I know, only geeks know about RSS. Yeah, but when your audience, your fans are 90%+ geeks, how can you not have a videoblog [with RSS feed]?

For whatever it’s worth, I loosely followed Rocketboom for a couple weeks following the very public breakup, but that didn’t hold my interest either. I was never a huge fan of Rocketboom with Amanda Congdon but readily admit it now feels a bit like Suzanne Somers leaving Three’s Company in season three.

Update 8:16am PST: Wow, didn’t take Amanda very long to show up in the comments below to confirm that by next week ABC will have an RSS feed. There’s the answer, folks, thanks again Amanda.

Weird blog coincidence alert! Also, after publishing I checked my RSS reader and saw a post from Loren at 1938 Media calling Amanda’s debut videoblog “horrible” (what, not a “horror show” Loren? Tell us what you really think). He also made reference to Suzanne Somers. I didn’t examine timestamps to who used that comparison first (probably him) but when I saw the reference I wanted to add an update with a link to his post.

• Rocketboom v2.0 returns with new interim host, tradeup and pirates, arr!
• Rocketboom host Amanda Congdon rocketed out the door
• Hmmcast #15: Birthdays, Rocketboom fireworks and blogger obligations
• Rocketboom not back yet plus Andrew’s side of the story
• TiVo starts testing pop-up ads on fast forward, no opt-out
• Day 2 of The Rocketboom Zone: the show must go on