Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron are the two main characters behind RocketBoom, one of the most successful video blogs available on the Web.

Though less than a year old, the RocketBoom video blog has seen a dramatic growth in popularity reaching recently over 200,000 downloads in a week.

The download consists of a daily 3-minute show that is both informative, ironic, innovative and irreverent.

The show can be viewed on any computer system having a Quicktime-or Windows-media compatible video player software (free) installed, by simply going to RocketBoom home page and selecting their preferred format.

RocketBoom, which is accessible also in BitTorrent format and as a RSS feed, covers a wide range of information and commentary from top news stories to little unknown stories taking place on the Internet.

RocketBoom doesn't cost thousands of dollars to produce, though ver 4 hours a day have to be spent on scripting, shooting, editing, titling and encoding the daily RocketBoom show before it goes live. Since it does take all those hours to create a 3-minute piece, our friends work often the night before until late to make sure their show goes online by 9am the next day.

Created with a consumer-level camcorder, a portable computer, and a few lights RocketBoom only major expense has been bandwidth costs. And with hardly any marketing and production costs this type of production is soon going to make TV executives start to think again about how disruptive these new grassroots communication technologies maybe to their own future.

Being distributed fully online RocketBoom has in fact a potentially much larger audience than any TV broadcast out there.

From their virtual world-reaching broadcasting tower, the RocketBoom guys go on-air everyday, from Monday through Friday at 9am Eastern.

Here is my cross-continental video interview, shot just a few hours ago, with Amanda and Andrew.

Video interview highlights:

• Amanda explains how it all started for her and what is her personal reason for keep going with RocketBoom.
• Andrew Barron recounts how he himself first started thanks to his interest in the 2004 USA political elections.
• Where do you need to go to study and learn more about video blogging?
• Good short explanation on how to create a video blog clip that can be published online, from downloading video footage to your computer, to editing and saving an encoded video clip ready for viewing on the Web.
• How to use video compression? Codecs, 3ivx, settings, compatibility. How does RocketBoom deals with these issues? Great info from Andrew here.
• How do Amanda and Andrew select their stories?
• How long does it take to produce RocketBoom?
• What is the number of visitors to RocketBoom?
• Who pays for all the bandwidth?
• Monetization? Advertising model?
• What to do to learn more about it and find technical support?
• A "Big Ciao" from Amanda and Drew.

Full interview clip recording.

Thank you guys for sharing your know-how and experience with us!

N.B.: Hats to RocketBoom unique Friday issue, posted yesterday and containing a full Carosello ad clip from early 60's Italian TV. Carosello has been an historical 15 minute ads-show aired on national Italian TV between the mid 50's and late 70's which had all of the baby boom generation kids glued to the tube, enjoying an advertising format that imprinted the audio-visual memories of that whole generation.

At the time of Carosello the ruling TV advertising policies imposed a maximum of 35" seconds of direct promotion within 35 film clips that lasted 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

I have no idea where Amanda and Drew have found this little Italian video gem, but I can assure you that there would be thousands of now middle-aged Italian moms and pops, who would be thankful to pay to buy Carosello ad shows compilations that would let them fly back to their teenager years.

For now, check out this great Lambretta ad clip from Italian group "Quartetto Cetra". Unforgettable.