I imagine the SXSW Interactive festival can look excessive, with all the blog posts, photos and videos of geeks out every night partying and having a little too much fun. But here’s an example of things that happen at SXSW which are why we all go: boarding the plane today, I ran into Pete Cashmore one last time, whose great blog Mashable had just run an insightful piece about our company a few hours before, and I was able to tell him in person I appreciated the story and let him know we’re fans.

This was just one of a hundred small but important interactions I had with people over the past week who are important to my life and work in some way, many of whom I only see once a year at gatherings like SXSW. It’s become the best opportunity to spend quality time with lots of people from across the interactive (and film and music) world in one place, and I’ve seen returns both personal and professional for every hour I’ve spent there.

The interactive conference was bookended for me by a couple of great NNN-related events that were part of both the Film and Interactive Festivals (which are separate, but feature a handful of joint panels and parties). (more…)

Congratulations to Steve and Zadi on the 100th Episode of EPIC FU (formerly JETSET). They started working with us at Next New Networks around episode 50, so that’s also getting close to a year of great episodes together. Marc Boxser from our team shot a tribute video featuring many of us from the New York office talking about our favorite EPIC FU moments of the past 100 episodes (with some great editing help from Justin and Ramon):

In the video are, in order: Marc Boxser, Jed Simmons, Steve Nelson, Liam Collins, Fred Seibert, Roy Weissman, Erik Beck and Gary, Patty DeArtega, Jared Roessler, Ramon DeSouza, Justin Johnson, Tim Shey, Corinne Leigh, Emil Rensing, Diane DeCordova, Herb Scannell, Scott Moschella, Dan Meth, Ben Ross, and Rob Czar.

You’ll notice some of the footage is messed up — maybe it’s something similar to what happened to EPIC FU’s latest episode, embedded here below. Can you figure out what’s going on? What exactly is FUnetics, and why are so many videos popping up on YouTube with the same mysterious pledge?

This year a number of us from Next New Networks will be at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, and if you’ll be there we’d love to meet you and hang out at the event.

Three of our networks will be covering the Film, Music, and Interactive portions of the Festival — Indy Mogul, ThreadBanger, and Epic Fu — with episodes both during and after the event. If you see anyone you recognize from the networks walking around, please say hi!

In addition, we’re joining with our friends at Tumblr to sponsor the most epic Rock Band party the world has ever known on Monday night. Party attendees can play Rock Band onstage (first come, first serve for signups), and SXSW Showcase bands Brenn and The Vettes will be playing to close out the night. More details on our SXSW party page, and you can RSVP on Upcoming or Facebook to make sure you get in the door.

For those of you attending the Film or Interactive portions of the festival, I’ll be moderating a Joint Film/Interactive Panel on Saturday morning at 10am called “Quit Your Day Job and Vlog,” with Lindsay Campbell from Wallstrip and the upcoming Mob Logic, Zadi Diaz from EPIC-FU, LisaNova’s Lisa Donovan and Bre Pettis of Make / Etsy fame. Please come on out and join us, and hope to see you there.

Back in May a former Turner Broadcasting colleague, Patrick de Bokay, stopped by to kindly ask me to judge the shorts competition at the Miami Film Festival. I don’t really like to travel, even to nice places, but when the date’s so far away I always say ‘yes’ since I figure 2 million things will get in the way and something will force me to not go.

I’ll be there next week, seeing some great films.

Along with what looked like a couple thousand other curious people from the online video, advertising, and marketing worlds, a group of us attended YouTube’s “Videocracy” advertiser upfront here in New York City Wednesday afternoon. A pretty massive production at NYC’s Terminal 5, it was also YouTube’s first real event of notice since the Google acquisition. YouTube pulled out all the stops, including an introduction from founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, testimonials from Tom Brady and Anderson Cooper (who showed up in person to talk about the YouTube-CNN debates), and a number of presentations about YouTube’s advertising initiatives, from their internal ad targeting and campaign creation system (called “Ginzu” — it slices, it dices…) to case studies from advertisers like HP, General Mills, and New Line, to their work with the IAB and sites like MySpace and Facebook to develop standards for video advertising. There’s a good recap on Ian Shafer’s blog. And of course — an eclectic mix of entertainment from some of YouTube’s biggest stars, including the Blendtec guy, singer Esmee Denters and Soulja Boy, who performed his ‘Crank that‘ song onstage that inspired tons of YouTube dance videos this year, which played in the background on a big screen.

YouTube set up a nice area for Rob and Corinne from ThreadBanger to meet advertisers and give demonstrations in the How-To pavilion of the event (near our friends from Make Magazine) - and incidentally, ThreadBanger’s featured on the front page of YouTube today for their special Valentine’s Day episode, so we’re appreciating two days of love.

While Rob and Corinne worked their magic (with Soulja Boy, I kid you not, crashed out on a nearby couch), we spent a good amount of time catching up with other people at the event, which included lots of agency and consumer brand contacts, execs from companies like Revision 3, Vuguru, and 60 Frames, and innovators of online video like Andrew Baron and Orrin Zucker. There was a moment when I looked around and realized the group of people standing together off to the side of the stage near me included Tay Zonday, Ian from Smosh, Lisa Nova, Michael Buckley and William Sledd — many of the individuals with the most subscribers on YouTube, standing for the moment incognito chatting together on the main floor, despite the millions who have watched their videos on the site. I thought of other upfronts I’ve attended, where the network stars would be carefully brought in and out of the crowd, and realized I’ll probably be looking back on that moment a few years from now as either the beginning, or the end, of something. Exactly which? Ask me next year.

update: Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman — whose advertising work I’m a big fan of — was at the event as well, and has posted some smart thoughts.

The sweet scent of victory. Yesterday’s Iowa Caucus was a huge one for the NNN political team. Our boy Obama won the Iowa caucus- and with her video gaining a million views in just over 24 hours, the Obama Girl herself gave her victory address this morning:

We’ll be watching out for our invitation to the inauguration. Meanwhile Veracifier had an unprecedented number of people reporting on the ground in Iowa- surely an internet first. Through our ground hounds partnership with the Uptake we posted multiple reports throughout the day, including most of the major candidate’s pre Caucus rallies:

and stories from across the state, like Hound Chuck Tomlinson’s take on the media blitz itself:

The Uptake itself streamed live video throughout the Caucus, and it was all done by the seat of our pants, with everyone surprised by both the quality and amount of reporting we were getting in from all of Iowa. Bring on New Hampshire!

When I worked in film, the dream goal was always to win an Oscar. When I worked in television, it was to win an Emmy. Now I spend my days plotting how to win a WEBBY!

The 12th Annual Webby Awards are swiftly approaching and the deadline to submit is going to be here any second! For all of you immensely talented creators, plotters, and doers of online video, your deadline for submission is JANUARY 25, 2008.

Once you submit, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences will select the nominees and winners for the 2008 Webby Awards, and hold the ceremony in early June (an event I swear you don’t want to miss).

Last year many people I know were nominated (eghem: JetSet now EpicFu, itsallinyourhands.com, and Big Fantastic…just to name a few), with several picking up the Webby. With that track record, and the year that all of us just had, I can only imagine the number of people I’ve met that will grab a Webby for themselves.

The categories were expanded from last year to accommodate the ever-expanding world of online video:

• Animation
• Comedy: Individual Short or Episode
• Comedy: Long Form or Series
• Documentary: Individual Episode
• Documentary: Series
• Drama: Individual Episode
• Drama: Series
• Events and Live Broadcasts
• Experimental
• How-To and DIY
• Music
• News & Politics: Individual Episode
• News & Politics: Series
• Public Service and Activism
• Reality
• Sports
• Student
• Technology
• Travel
• Variety
• Viral

The ONLY catch would be you actually have to submit to win. So here it is, I’m telling ALL of you how awesomely creative and talented you are, and that I think you have a chance. So make it happen!

I only have one piece of advice: You better be on your game when choosing your “five words.”

Good Luck!

We’ll be out in force at NewTeeVee’s NYC Screening this Monday, and hope to see you there if you’re in the area.

We sponsored one of the Pier Screenings this summer out in San Francisco and had a great time; we’ll be sponsoring again and helping out with the event, and are really happy the NewTeeVee gang’s come out to our part of town. Should be a great time, with lots of NY’s finest online video people, including the event’s co-producers, Blip.tv, and a judging panel with our friends from The Burg, Vimeo, and Barely Political. Watch the nominated videos on a big screen and vote for your favorites, with the winners getting some cool prizes from the sponsors. And more importantly, the last one I went to had free popcorn and beer.

Register for free here.

Some of Next New Networks (and new media’s) best friends are at Apple, especially Pete Alcorn and Scott Simpson at iTunes.

Pete and Scott were the first big supporters of what Emil and I were doing a couple of years ago with VOD Cars and Channel Frederator. They promoted us to popularity at every turn and when we launched NNN this year they’ve been there whenever one of our new networks goes online.

So, we put together special Freddie Awards for each of them last January, but when they couldn’t make the show we decided to wait. Pete came by for a visit last week and I couldn’t have been prouder to give the award to anyone in the world.

Thanks Pete. Thanks Scott. Thanks Apple.