Earlier this week, we announced that BarelyPolitical.com, the upstarts behind hit online videos like “Crush on Obama,” was acquired by Next New Networks, and the creator and owner, Ben Relles, has joined us full-time to build out BarelyPolitical into a new political comedy network. We’ll get to the reaction on that in a second, but first — a lot of people here at Next New Networks worked hard to make this happen, and help Ben to expand his vision for the network over the past month or two. Our production team, who are already busy around the clock supporting networks like Fast Lane Daily, Indy Mogul, and more, really stepped up to help produce “I Like a Boy,” the first BarelyPolitical / Next New Networks project (embedded below), and our business team helped get the video in front of editorial teams at partners like YouTube, Veoh, and Break to help the video hit a million views across the web in its first few days of release.

Wednesday, BarelyPolitical.com relaunched with a new design and powered by the Next New Networks platform, and began adding “Barely Daily” programming, which is currently going to update at least three times a week — the first week of videos includes a great report by videoblogger Jennifer Prediger (who came to us through Veracifier’s Marc Boxser), who asked people around New York and DC to sign a going away card for Karl Rove, and a truly bizarre Obama Girl response video from comedy legend Jackie Mason. A couple people in particular, especially Marc Boxser, our Ideas & Culture network manager, Paul Blakely, Todd Morningstar and Marc Goldberg from our technology team, and our newest preditor (producer/editor) Ramon Desouza really put in extra hours to make this site happen, and proved to me once again what an amazing team we’re building here at Next New Networks. There’s a bit of work still needed to do on the site — adding iTunes and subscription feeds, a video archive, and embed and sharing features — but it should be running at full steam by early next week.

There’s been a lot of great coverage and pickup of the story so far — here are a couple highlights:

There were also a couple pieces that raised good questions, like Fast Company’s wondering about what this all means for the future look of television, Valleywag’s post, which was fine with me (thanks for the link!), and Om Malik’s smart observation that startups are beginning to band together in the space. The only way we can answer them is to help Ben turn Barely Political into something bigger than it was before — which we’re hard at work now trying to do. In the meantime, we’re really excited about welcoming Ben to our team, and to be working with his many collaborators and emerging stars of the web like the singer/songwriter Leah Kauffman, the charming Amber Ettinger, and new videobloggers like Jenn Themelis and Jennifer Prediger. With places like the Daily Show, Huffington Post, and The Onion all launching great online video content right now as well, the real winners this election season are going to be viewers on the web.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Tim at 4:23 pm on Friday, October 19th, 2007 in Humor, News, Next New Networks, Politics. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.