Photo by Scott Beale

Last night, I ventured over to the first annual Vloggies, the award ceremony celebrating the top video bloggers in the world. The show, which was held at the Swedish American Hall in SF, was absolutely fantastic. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect–but, needless to say, my empty expectations were surpassed tenfold. Aside from a few technical issues in the beginning, the entire show went smoothly and professionally.

I go to a lot of tech events in the bay area, and the Vloggies was like no other tech event. This really was an award show. Most people showed up in their best dresses and suits, ready to receive or give awards. The show was also entertaining, striking the right balance between breadth and depth. This is really important, since there was no way they could have presented the thousands of video blogging nominees from all over the world.

The Vloggies was principally created and executed by John Furrier and Irina Slutsky of PodTech. Irina also hosted the show, and did a wonderful job.

Whenever I go to shows like these, I always find it surreal to watch video blogs on a big screen. When you think of Social Media, you usually imagine the millions of small screens that video blogs can easily reach. Traditional media is what we usually associate with big screens and budgets. It’s nice to see the big recognition that vloggers deserve.

In true SF fashion, there was a gaggle of top A-list bloggers, vloggers, and entrepreneurs were in the crowd, including Robert Scoble, Renee Blodgett, Kevin Rose, and Thomas Hawk. And obviously, there’s a steady stream of photos being uploaded to Flickr.

It appears that this is the recipe for success in online video blogs: hot looking girl + technology + video = traffic. Never a company to fall behind on the newest trends, Yahoo has released their video blog The 9. They scour the web daily for the most humorous, interesting, and outrageous videos and photos, and then deliver it in a monologue format (ie. hot girl talking). Is this something that Rocketboom needs to worry about?

Not hardly. The 9 sticks to relatively safe and popular media, with a monologue format that isn’t too far from what you would see on a topical news TV show. The subjects explored range from technology news, strange videos, and celebrity news. Due to the kind of mainstream traffic Yahoo gets, I’m sure throwing in celebrity news was an easy decision to easily win some loyal viewers.

The central idea is that their team of “monkeys” scours the net and the host, Maria Sansone, delivers the package. Users are also able to vote and rank the stories. The relevant links to the 9 videos are presented in a column to the right of the video. During the actual monologue, only segments of each video (or media) is shown, thus, urging the viewer to follow the links. Since Yahoo has a lot of bandwidth to spare (and, not to mention the heavy involvement of Pepsi as their sponsor), the monologue is delivered with pretty good video quality via a Flash interface, and is larger than other video blogs out there.

In the end, The 9 is more like a TV show than a video blog, which may be what Yahoo is going for anyway. It is, however, exposing the mainstream to watching a regularly updated online video segment everyday, which is a good thing for new media. But when it comes to niche, Rocketboom still has it. We’ll just have to see how the audience likes Joanne Colan, the new host.