They rose like a rocket and crashed with a boom

AS the rambunctious entertainers of the Internet make their plays for the showbiz big leagues, these overnight superstars are enjoying the standard introduction to Hollywood. Which means not just glad-handing agents and Kafkaesque "lunch meetings" but also the bitter falling-out with your partners from the 'hood, complete with morning-after mudslinging.

Take the case of the former partners in the popular video blog (or vblog) Rocketboom, who are now in the midst of a blood feud that has turned into the nastiest, highest-profile divorce yet to quake the Web. A wry, dead-on rendition of a network news show, featuring a comely, blond 20-something anchor offering scattershot deadpan around clips of "found news" from across the Net, Rocketboom showed the potential to adapt a traditional TV format to the Internet when it debuted in fall 2004. In the process it attracted an estimated 300,000 viewers a day -- more than many cable-news network shows -- and held a high-profile auction of its ad space on EBay, which drew a winning bid of $80,000. The site's quick success earned flavor-of-the-month media attention for its anchor, Amanda Congdon, and its creator-producer, a design and technology teacher named Andrew Baron.

And then, last July, the partnership broke up; Congdon left Rocket amid a hailstorm of acrimony that would make Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman proud. But coming from nowhere as they had, the pair had no clear script to follow in their break-up, no ritual of prenups and clearly defined intellectual property guidelines. And so, six months later, in what is likely a harbinger of things to come for many a Web team, the pair continue to sling invective at each other on message boards and blog entries across the Web. Bystanders, meanwhile, have mostly rolled their eyes at the level of animosity.

Reconstructing the history of Rocketboom through the eyes of its principals is a bit of a he-said/she-said proposition. In a series of interviews, both Baron and Congdon told of a partnership that enjoyed a brief creative flourish that soon morphed into a frenzy of activity, and then into an increasingly fraught working relationship, which led to the very public meltdown. In the lingering custody battle over the soul (and wallet) of Rocketboom, the former partners each accuse the other of betrayal, slander, bad faith and, worst of all, old-media values.