Read this any which way you want, the future of TV is brighter than it’s ever been.

Micki Krimmel with the team. Photo by Pulp Secret’s Charles Schneider.

The one and only Micki Krimmel was recently visiting New York for the first time in years, and we asked her to come and do a workshop with our team about building better community features for our audiences.

Besides being the only person I know of who has a photo of herself with Al Gore up on Flickr, Micki has been a web guru to countless people in her work at Participant (where she helped Mr. Gore build the massive grassroots movement at climatecrisis.net), Revver, WorldChanging, and most recently as a social media consultant and entrepreneur.

Out of our two hour brainstorming session about our networks and shows came a number of suggestions that would be great for anyone building an offering around video content on the web:

1. Everybody should be a community manager.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a person in your company with a title of community manager, or director of community. Every person on the team should be involved and responding and keeping the conversation going.*

*Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, is required reading for anyone in our space.

2. Whuffi can be more valuable than money.

Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom describes a future where all material needs are met, so people are incentivized by reputation and social capital - Whuffi. This is something that happens in communities all the time — people can often get things done by virtue of their social reputation or prestige that money can’t. Tara Hunt’s new book is all about it. [Micki added on her blog: “My point here was about incentives. It’s common for people to want to provide material incentives to people for participating in their community. People don’t talk to each other for prizes. They do it for other, more personal reasons. They do it for social capital, for whuffie, or as Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, Love.”]

3. The most scalable way to respond to people is openly and publicly.

Micki cited tools like Get Satisfaction as a way to respond to customer questions in a public, easy to access way, as well as elements in our networks like Indy Mogul and ThreadBanger that turn responses to viewer questions into content for the whole audience.

4. Consider ending every video with a question.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but a simple way to get audience responses that not enough video creators do. Ze Frank did it brilliantly. We recently ended our breakout Ultra Kawaii hit (2mm+ views), “Animal Idol”, with a question that’s garnered over 30,000 comments and counting across the web (according to TubeMogul, we’re still averaging over 750 comments a day on that episode, despite it being up for two months).

5. The easier you make it to participate, the more people will.

It’s easier to favorite or digg something than rate something, easier to rate something than comment or review — which is consistently why less people do each of those things. You could follow a question (see #4) with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down polling widget. Our new Nite Fite site is going to include a simple tool to poll people during and after every episode, and it’s going to be interesting to see if people use it more than they use comments.

6. People put something on their blogs because it says something about them, not because they want to promote a product they like.

Think about that one for a while.

7. The difference between your YouTube channel and your site is often like the difference between a public and a private space.

We talked about this for a while: for instance, how comments on a YouTube video tend to be about the creators, where comments on your own site tend more to be addressed to the creators. The difference between one place and the other can be like the difference between watching a movie in the movie theater with a bunch of strangers, and watching it at home with a group of your friends.

8. Don’t just reward the top participators.

Having all kinds of participation is valuable. Look for ways to welcome the newest people who post for the first time or join the community.

9. If you don’t have the tool, that doesn’t mean don’t do it.

Engage people with whatever tools you have. A great example from our own world is the Indy Mogul “Request an Effect” page, which addresses rule #3 above with a pretty basic tool: a blog post with a super long comments thread. However, with over 1000 comments page has gotten so hard to use, we’re probably not getting as much participation as we could (see rule #5) — if we replaced this page with a browsable, searchable forum of some kind where people could vote on favorites, it would get even more use.

10. Don’t worry about exclusive content for your site.

Content goes where it wants. What’s exclusive about your site is the community experience you offer — it can be a safe place, where you can get to know people with common interests. Making that the best experience possible is the real key to building unique value in your site.

Thanks, Micki! So I’m curious — anyone reading out there: useful? What would you add to Micki’s advice?

Josh- Our Man of the Year

Veracifier’s star Josh Marshall and TPM won a George Polk journalism award yesterday for their reporting on the federal prosecutors firing scandal in 2007. Traditional journalism accolades such as the Polk underline that bloggers like Josh are proving the success of old fashioned gum shoe journalism through the medium of new media. A huge congratulations to TPM. We continue to be proud to be associated with them.

Lincoln Bjorkman, EVP, Executive Creative Director, Digitas.

John McCarus is the VP, Brand Content at Digitas. He was nice enough to ask our head of media sales, George Stewart, to come by his DTOX creative conference, put on for the creative staff at this leading interactive agency. I spoke on a distinguished panel that included singer/songwriter Vanessa Carlton, videoblogger David Junior, my former colleague David Gale from MTV, and Dina Kaplan, COO/founder of Blip TV. What a wonderful event. It’s rare an agency, especially one that already specializes in digital, to want to constantly introduce themselves to outside points of view. It was an honor to be included.

John McCarus,
VP Brand Content, Digitas.

Congrats to Ben Relles and Amber Lee Ettinger and the Barely Political crew for making many year end “Tops” of 2007 lists. Ben brought some great characters into the world this year but none more newsworthy than “Obama Girl”. My favorite: Obama Girl listed as one of 2007’s Most Influential Woman with folks like Hillary Clinton. First, it was the internet, and now it’s the world! Check out some of the lists and related press:

Google: Top 10 Video of the Year
This was selected by Google based on a number of factors.

People Magazine: Top Web Videos of the Year
(Print Ediiton) Obama Girl was top video listed

MSN: List of Most Influential Women of 2007
She was #6 on the list along with Hilary Clinton, Tina Fey…

AOL Best YouTube Moments
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2007/12/18/best-youtube-moments-of-2007/

AP: Top Cultural Moments of the Year
They listed Obama Girl in June section.

Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith’s depiction of the Democratic candidates going at it like children with Tim Russert in middle just cracks me up.

as seen on Veracifier

02 November 2007
Obama Says Hil Plays the Victim, and all the Democrats Fight
By: Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith

Scene: An angered America momentarily eschews apathy for that interlude of quasi-interesting politics known as the “campaign season.” The sides polarize; neoconservatives debate their decently lousy options (a Mormon or a man that used to live with gay men) brandishing crosses and flags of Israel, left-wing liberals put their bleeding hearts aside to bicker over who’s is bigger after all. And all of it happens on T.V.

Enter stage right: Barack Obama, new and interesting Democratic candidate who is losing momentum in the polls to political heiress and former first lady, Hillary Clinton.

Enter stage right: Hillary Clinton, clad in a suitably-masculine suit, power heels, and poofy “I’m not a girl! I’m not!” hairdo, accompanied by her intern-loving husband.

Camera pans to Tim Russert, sitting in the front passenger seat of a Honda Odyssey (it’s fuel efficient!). While Dick Cheney drives full-speed ahead on a Middle Eastern highway, Russert plays mommy to the bickering, hair-pulling, finger-pointing children in the back. I mean, the Democratic candidates for President. Roll film.

This week we launched ViroPop, our new network devoted to “Environmentalism Made Fun.” From the about page:

ViroPop is the first network on the Internet to treat the new environmental pop culture with a sense of irreverent fun. Long dreary powerpoint presentations…be gone! This is the happy Green Revolution.

Right on. We have a lot of plans for ViroPop, starting with our first show, the excellent, saucy ZapRoot, hosted by Jessica Williamson, who should make a splash in the videoblogging scene, and produced by Damien Somerset (WorldChanging, Ask a Ninja, among many other credits) and independent filmmaker Sarah Szalavitz, both of whom, besides having created and brought us the show, have been collaborating with us on a number of other fronts as we ready ViroPop and more networks on the way. They’re incredibly smart and talented and respected in the community, and the show has debuted to strong reviews and great views, a sign of many good things to come.

I’m personally excited we’re doing this as I started my own path into green pop culture working as the lowly, underfoot college kid in a collective of artists and activists, Betapunks/Ecomedia, back in ‘92 (who made cool films, and threw cooler parties), and last year worked to convince organizations like the NRDC to get involved with Amanda Across America, which was a completely new way of making media about environmental issues. And that’s just me — lots of the people here at NNN have been involved in green projects, and there’s a ton of excitement and passion here, and almost too many ideas of where this network can go. Hope you’ll subscribe and stay tuned for what ViroPop has in store.

It’s not The Sorpranos, though that was a pretty cool show, and sad to see it end, if it ended or whatever happened. But, it does star one of its’ cast. And it’s not even a TV show. It’s a radio show.

Many Sunday nights, I revert to my childhood, jump into bed and ditch the lights (radio sounds better that way ) and tune into Little Steven’s Underground Garage. Little Steven, best known from Bruce’s band and as (dead or alive?) Silvio on the Sorpranos, is the master of ceremonies behind a weekly rock and roll circus where you’re likely to hear everything from original garage band Count Five to contemporary garage ( Steven’s term) like The Charms (my fave) and a sprinkling of the Stones (the London Record years), Iggy and, of course, the Ramones. And each week, Steven keeps contemporary garage alive and kicking featuring a different “Coolest Song in the World” and introducing bands heard little on commercial radio.

Little Steven has created a soundtrack of my life (not to be confused with the Swedish band Soundtrack of Our Lives that he plays regularly and who are very cool). And if you’re not into appointment radio, you can check out the Underground Garage website, hear past radio shows, see playlists, station listings and all things garage whenever you want.

And there’s a method to his madness. A friend of mine told me that there’s only one rule that guides the choices Steven makes. The rule: it’s got to have inspired the Ramones or been inspired by the Ramones. For me that defines good music: from The Wall of Sound to The British Invasion to 70’s punk, Nirvana and it’s present day descendents.

But the brillance of the show doesn’t lie in just the music—it’s what surrounds the sounds. Soundbites from classic b-movies (are there any other kind?) like Hell’s Angels, or non-sequitors from tough guy James Cagney, The Marx Brothers, or Batman (the TV series, of course). Add tributes to true iconoclasts like Roger Corman, Alan Freed, Brian Wilson, and culture markers like Shindig, CBGB’s and odes to everything from go-go girls to songs of Summer, narrated in Steven’s very cool way and you’ve got radio that’s audio and visual.

And that’s cool. Thanks Steven.

This week is the week that all the broadcast networks convene in NYC for the “upfronts” to present their new Fall lineups and wine and dine advertisers to put their money down on their new shows. Shrinking audiences has been a dynamic of broadcast networks since the coming of age cable, beginning measurably in the 90’s. But this year there’s new shrinkage. Apparently, there are 2.5mm less viewers coming to broadcast this Spring then last, and there are all kinds of suspects from daylight savings time to DVR’s to the shows’ quality themselves. Last year shrinkage was felt at the upfronts, when UPN and the WB, resulted in the CW, and one less network. Recently, it was reported that that merger actually netted a shrinking audience as the CW resulted, much of the time, in less viewers coming to the one new channel than each of the old networks. And before that — shrinkage took the form of less nights of original programming as ABC, CBS, and NBC all have given up on programming on Saturday nights and run mostly repeats of that weeks’ top shows.

So where does shrinkage stop? At Next New Networks, we salute the broadcast networks for shrinkage and we encourage them to come clean and declare shrinkage the way of the future and learn to love it like we do. That’s what we’ve done — creating micro-networks, and shrinking shows down to minutes. Get with the program(s) guys and love your shrinking world. We do.

Jakob Lodwick, who’s been a good friend to us, for instance, introducing us to Justin Johnson, made a great video for a company retreat explaining what they’re trying to do with Vimeo (embedded below). I’ve had a number of friends voice concern about the state of personal videoblogging lately; that the move towards shows and networks on the internet might be overtaking the impulse to communicate that got people started. I go to sites like Vimeo pretty often to see that the conversation’s alive and well.