Online Media Cultist

WebbAlert is a new online video news show that is scheduled to produce shows four days a week with a focus on hot web and tech stories. It’s hosted by Morgan Webb, who is also involved with G4’s X-Play.

Here’s today’s edition:

My overall take is that we’re seeing a high production value entry into the online video news scene. It’s news about the web for people interested in the web, produced on the web. And for that it gets the OMC official thumbs up I’d much rather watch WebbAlert than any of the broadcast television news shows (the only TV news show I watch regularly is Hardball, with a splash of Meet the Press and a healthy dose of The Daily Show in the fake news department).

While it’s probable that I can get the same information through a quick visit to Techmeme, I was genuinely impressed by WebbAlert’s presentation and ordering of web news stories. It’s the kind of thing I might throw on in the late afternoon while I’m hustling and bustling through 300-350 other tasks, and the show works just as well as an audio track running in the background, kind of wrapping up the day’s hot web stories.

As for “the commercials,” it runs a very brief mid-role video ad, which works fine as a palate cleanser. WebbAlert has been getting a nice amount of coverage since yesterday, and not all of it super positive. Deep Jive Interests and a few others muse about the possibility that WebbAlert ad partner Federated Media is influencing the wildly positive coverage seen on TechCrunch and other FM sites. While this is fair speculation given FM’s strange and short-sighted “conversational marketing” campaign, I’m doubtful that WebbAlert’s early coverage has been influenced in such a way.

TechCrunch, for its part, has written about WebbAlert two days in a row now.

Maybe the “undue influence” comes from Michael Arrington’s opinion that Morgan Webb is “fairly hot”?

(I find the term “fairly hot” fairly hilarious for some reason.)