Vloggies Night in San Francisco

UPDATE:  Vloggies video montage from PodTech.

Last night was a great night for a community that is growing into an industry.  The first annual videoblog awards pulled together a community and created an growing industry. 

Clearly the market wants more content and advertisers showed up.  Yahoo Video, Intel, Revver, Blip.tv, Dabble, WebEx, Google, and Apple among others. PodTech was proud to have put this together because of the energy and spirit that this community puts out. 

I really wanted to do the vloggies for two reasons:  1) Irina Slutsky’s passion and vision – after vloggercon we both agreed that this would be a great thing and did her vision come true – a big congrats to Irina, and 2) PodTech’s vision is one of creation and creativity around the Internet as a direct platform for media developers – I want to promote and highlight the leaders developing media because of the quality of the people plus there isn’t enough supply of content on the market in this format.  The creative and technical talent creating this industry will only get stronger.  Very similar to Jerry Zuckers story.  In fact Jerry Zucker’ s words during his keynote sum it up..” in the beginning it was about experimenting, playing, and having fun, but thechallenge was that we had to build a theater to get people to watch their work.  Today is different with the Internet…you have the possibility to take the stuff today and send it around the world…for almost nothing and the equipment is fanstastic…this new technology will change the way we view entertainment…you all (videobloggers) are at the beginning of it…”

This is a market of creative experimenters and entrepreneurs who are pushing the new technology to create new ways to create, publish, and distribute media.  Being an entrepreneur in the high tech business for years I can’t help but agree strongly with Kevin Marks post.  Filmmaking and technology ventures are very similar. 

The Vloggies debut will be remembered for many of the pioneers who have devoted their passion to experiment and play with the new media.  The surprise of the night was a guest appearance by Jerry Zucker who I’ve been collaborating with for the past few months.  He gave the intro keynote that had humor, a personal story, and inspiration closing. 

Of course photos are flying around thanks to the two stars Scott Beale and Thomas Hawk . 

Coverage on Podtech and Techmeme.  Outside of Robert Scoble, Tom Foremski had the first post of the night.   Rene Blogett had great coverage from the third row.

The vloggies was all about a celebration of all the people building a new industry.  I’m excited to be participating in it and proud to have developed the vloggies with Irina, Eddie, Valerie, Robert, Maryam, Dan, Joe, and the rest of the team who pulled it together.  Big KUDOS to all.