It's not just cool, though, it's prescient. The vlog has been up and running for 14 months, but it's only in the last two that Web video has become new media's favorite new medium -- since Apple Computer's iTunes online store began stocking vlogs, calling them video podcasts and making it easy to download them for free viewing on the new iPods. In fact, the day Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, introduced the video iPod to developers, he showed a playlist of video podcasts on his computer. Rocketboom was at the top.

In case you're wondering, it has occurred to Mr. Baron and Ms. Congdon that they just might be sitting on a gold mine. At a cost of about $20 an episode, they reach an audience that some days is roughly comparable in size to that of, say, CNN's late, unlamented "Crossfire" political debate show. They have no background in business, but Jeff Jarvis, who tracks developments in technology and culture on his blog, BuzzMachine.com (and who has served as a consultant to The New York Times on Web matters), pointed out to them that they might be able to charge $8,000 for an interactive ad at the end of the show, which would bring in about $2 million annually.

The financial opportunity here has occurred to others, too. TiVo, which can now be used to watch Web video on home television sets, just signed a deal to list Rocketboom in the TiVo directory -- making it as easy to record as conventional television programs like "60 Minutes" and "Monday Night Football." Giving up no creative control, Ms. Congdon and Mr. Baron will get 50 percent of the revenue from ads sold by TiVo to appear before and after their newscast, and their show will gain access to more than 300,000 TV sets connected to those new TiVo boxes. (That won't include Mr. Baron, though, since he gave up watching television years ago, and doesn't even own a set. He briefly considered buying one this year, but the thought passed. "I guess I'm going to hold out," he said.)

THE rapid expansion in the number of vlogs and Web sites offering video podcasts strongly suggests how bored viewers are getting with standard commercial TV: a growing number of them are willing to seek out alternatives online, or just create one themselves. As recently as a year ago there were fewer than two dozen active vlogs. In mid-October, just after Mr. Jobs name-checked Rocketboom, and Apple added the category of "Video Podcast" to the default menu of the new iPod, the site Vlogmap.org showed 415 vlogs worldwide. A month later Mefeedia.com, a site that allows users to watch and subscribe to vlogs, had 1,100 sites in its directory. Two weeks after that Mefeedia boasted of "2,017 vlogs and counting." Rocketboom includes reports from vloggers both near (Boston) and far (Prague), with regular contributors based in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and "the German-speaking part of Europe."

Many of the world's other vlogs are closer in form to diaries or home movies -- with all the tedium that can imply. Still, some have their fans, such as the filmmaker Ross McElwee, whose personal documentaries, including "Sherman's March," have elevated the home movie into a serious art form. "Most of the vlogs are quite boring," he said recently by e-mail, "but now and then there is one that for some reason seems to have something special." Mr. McElwee cited one called Mom's Brag Vlog that documents events like trick-or-treating at the mall and a spider spinning a web outside a family's house. "It's so mundane and down-to-earth that it's charming," he said, "in small doses."