The Revenge of Veronica Belmont

Americans love to put people on pedestals. This can be seen most profoundly in our obsession with celebrities, especially the young, female, and attractive ones. Observe members of the fan clubs created for Miley Cyrus, Katharine McPhee, Keira Knightley, and Hayden Panettiere, and you will see behavior that borders on religious worship. However, if there is one thing that we love to see more than a person's rise to stardom, it is their fall from grace. Just ask Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears. Especially Britney Spears.

This cycle of ascension and plummet back to earth is relatively new to the technology celebrity crowd mainly because the celebrity phenomena is relatively new to the technology enthusiast demographic. However, the past year brought a new crop of fresh young female faces to the forefront of the industry. They were the "Mac Pack" of Silicon Valleywood including Cali Lewis, Zadi Diaz, Natali del Conte, and Morgan Webb. In fact, like true stars, you could get away with just mentioning them by their first names: Cali, Zadi, Natali, and Morgan. The most prominent member of the group was Veronica Belmont. She is so famous that if you simply do a search on "veronica" in Google, then her blog is the first result.

However, Veronica did not start at the head of this digerati class. In fact she operated behind the scenes as a producer of the most popular technology podcasts, CNET's Buzz Out Loud, starring Molly Wood and Tom Merritt.

From silent producer to occasional hurler of quips to full blown third host, her popularity grew and she eventually gained the respect and admiration of the Buzz Out Loud audience. Eventually, she began to appear everywhere at CNET. Their then new CNET TV set of online videos featured two shows headlined by Veronica: Prizefight and Crave. Soon she became the Darling Princess of CNET. Her appearances on popular technology and gaming podcasts such as DL.tv, PC Gamer, This Week in Tech, The MacCast, and Cranky Geeks proved that everyone wanted a piece of CNET's brightest star.

And then she left in June of last year one day before her 25th birthday. Veronica's departure probably would not have garnered as much attention in the technology community if she had left to join her boyfriend Ryan Block's Engadget consumer electronic media company. That would have been perceived as the Princess going to the realm of her White Knight to start a family and raise beautiful little techies. However, Veronica chose to join Jason Calacanis' latest venture which was more akin to running away with the Black Knight to get knocked up and give birth to illegitimate mongrel children.

Calacanis is a fixture of the Silicon Valley community with deep experience and insight into the venture capital landscape. However, his business savvy is often overshadowed by his outspoken nature. His public confrontations with Andrew Baron, Dave Winer, and Danny Sullivan suggest a brash and angry personality that has done little to endear him with an audience that prefer their technology personalities to be more Leo Laporte than Howard Dean. However, it was Calacanis' fight with Kevin Rose that cemented his dislike in the technology community. Rose, founder of the popular social news website Digg, is practically a saint to tech enthusiasts. Calacanis accused Rose of profiting from the work of Digg contributers who make the site successful from their free labor. Calacanis felt that he could build a better social news site by paying editors and users to vote on the top stories, and so he revamped the Netscape news site to use this model. However, Rose's cult of personality won in the end, and Calacanis resigned from Netscape.

Having failed to beat Digg in the social news game, Calacanis next tried to take on Google. He created a human powered web site called Mahalo that was designed to provide hand-crafted search results. Calacanis probably realized that he needed a personality to make the site successful just as Kevin Rose's personality is a large part of Digg's success. Selecting a popular female web celebrity would be the only way to trump Kevin Rose, and Veronica was the perfect candidate. Smart, attractive, and tremendously well-liked, she was convinced by Calacanis to leave CNET and produce Mahalo Daily, a daily online show highlighting content from Mahalo. She would be the star of the show instead of a member of the Buzz Out Loud troika. However, apart from Calacani's poor reputation with most of her constituents, there were other two drawbacks to Veronica's new source of employment. First, she would practically disappear from the Internet video scene for three months until it debuted on November 5th, 2007. Second, the show would cover seemingly random topics instead of focusing on technology.

Mahalo Daily's lack of focus on technology was what most disappointed her tech loving fans. While the first episode was about the technology filled Tesla Roadster, the next episodes contained a Yo-Yo Championship, random questioning of people about the Democratic candidates for US President, how to DJ, how to cure a hangover, and a Grilled Cheese Festival. Sure, interspersed in this mix were tech related episodes about video game addiction and tumblr, but the show's content didn't seem to resonate with viewers. Michael Tolosa created a blog posting on December 14th, 2007 that seemed to echo the feelings of many fans:

While all of this might be good news for CNET, there are some potential losers with this news. While it pains me to say this, I think Veronica Belmont may have drawn a short straw by leaving CNET.

Belmont recently left the company to host a daily video podcast for Mahalo — an up-and-coming “human search” engine site. I had high hopes for Veronica, because I thought she was the most charismatic podcast host out there and had the greatest potential to succeed with her own podcast. Unfortunately, her joining Mahalo doesn’t seem to have been a good match. I thought it was too ambitious of her to do a daily podcast on totally random topics. First of all, a daily video podcast is hard work. In order to turn something around daily, you need a nice studio and a big staff who can create high-quality work quickly. Instead, Mahalo Daily looks low-fi and rushed. She should have started with a weekly podcast and made sure it was high-quality & polished. Another sign that her podcast might not last long is how it doesn’t have any connection with the Mahalo site, which it’s supposed to be promoting. I have personally never gone to Mahalo.com after watching the Mahalo Daily podcast. There needs to be some sort of compelling call-to-action at the end of her podcast to get viewers to visit Mahalo.com.

Veronica Belmont is a superstar. She really needs to focus her talent someplace where it makes sense and go to a company that can provide her with a bigger budget and a bigger production staff. Someplace like… CNET?

Public perception of Veronica also suffered another setback when an episode about surfing featured her in a skin tight wet suit. This was soon followed by an episode about yoga that showed her in a crouching position for the entire episode wearing a cleavage bearing top. To some users, it seemed that the show was catering to the lowest common denominator by taking advantage of Veronica's attractiveness instead of presenting quality content.

The large amount of public ridicule being thrown at her seemed to take its toll on Veronica. She posted this to her Twitter feed the day after Christmas just a couple of months after launching Mahalo Daily:

What a merry christmas for me on the internets today. Not. I have a thick skin, believe me, but it's piling on right now. 09:38 AM December 26, 2007 from web

However, the show continued on, and it soon began to improve. While well produced from the beginning, the production values increased and Veronica seemed to become more confident. Mahala Daily covered CES, one of the year's biggest tech fests, and Veronica provided standout commentary demonstrating her continued growth as a tech journalist. Furthermore, the show began covering more tech related content such as the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death and 3D Scanning. She scored interviews with geek demigods like Stan Lee and William Shatner. However, the biggest vote of confidence came from Steve Jobs himself at MacWorld when a picture next to him on the giant screen showed an icon for Mahalo Daily with Veronica's stylized face smiling at the audience.

Mahalo Daily followed up with a very popular 60 second recap of Jobs' keynote which soon went viral and was reposted on numerous blog sites. With this change in its fortunes, Mahalo Daily has an opportunity to leverage this positive visibility and extend its audience if it can manage to produce content that resonates with the core demographic that has always lavished love on Veronica: geeks. In many ways, Veronica has earned political capital, and she can well spend it by making the rounds of tech podcasts and drumming up support from her base. This will allow her a sense of vindication and also silence the naysayers who felt that she had jumped too early from CNET's flagship podcast.

Another woman known for her good looks who also suffered a similar fall from grace and resurgence is Vanessa Williams, the former Miss America who transformed herself from a disgraced beauty queen to a successful singer and actress. After climbing to the top of the music charts, she stated in 1990, "success is the best revenge". It seems that Veronica Belmont is taking her advice.