As Allen Stern noted on his blog, earlier this week The Media Kitchen held the Digital Media Venture Conference, introducing their clients to innovative VC-funded startups that are changing the media plans of tomorrow. The Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman approached us about helping them create an icebreaker video to kick off the spirit of the day, and we jumped at the chance to work with them on it, as Darren and The Media Kitchen have been big supporters and cheerleaders of our work.

After a bit of brainstorming with Darren and MK’s president, Barry Lowenthal, we came up with the video embedded above (here’s an HD version), featuring Gary, Indy Mogul’s incomparable puppet co-host (mostly because he’d be available for all the shoots) in a whirlwind tour of some of the better-known companies in Silicon Alley. All glory due to the amazing Justin Johnson, NNN’s superstar associate producer and first hire, who wrote, directed and produced the piece in a couple days’ time with no budget and a supplemental crew of one, which to me is just incredible.

Special thanks to Barry, Darren and Nicole DelVecchio from The Media Kitchen, David and Marco from Tumblr, Richard Blakeley from Gawker Media, Jake and Amir from CollegeHumor, Erik Beck, Derek D, Rob Czar and Corinne Leigh from Next New Networks, and Lindsay Campbell and Julie Alexandria from CBS Interactive for being such good sports, and to all the other people from NNN and Frederator who helped out as Rock Band partygoers or Gary stand-ins (especially Ben Ross). And special props to Kyle Fassenella, who DP’d and contributed all the amazing steadicam work; Rachel Garcia, for coming up with the idea to have Gary be the star; and Liam Collins, our super-nice VP of Finance and Business Affairs, for playing against type as the jerk who tells Erik to get back to work.

What a crazy, fun, intense, and exhausting week it turned out to be! There were parties, meetups, conferences, and endless meetings to be had, and it all concluded with the Webby Awards. I didn’t make it to the Webby Gala, but I did hit up the Webby Film & Video Awards, and had an amazing time with Tim Shey, Rachel Garcia, Erin Flood, Derek DeAngelis, Roy Weissman, and Vanessa Pappas!!

Vanessa Pappas, Kenyatta Cheese (Rocketboom), Erin Flood

The night started off with a cocktail reception, which I remarked felt like some sort of a high school reunion. Just about every person I adore from the Video 2.0 industry was there, and I felt at home.
We drank champagne, posed for pics (That’s Webby Award Winner Derek D and myself), and caught up with old friends as we readied ourselves for a three hour ceremony hosted by 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander. As Derek D accepted the People’s Choice Award for Sports, we cheered him on from our seats (which happened to be next to where Lorne Michaels, Michel Gondry, Rosie Perez, and Seth Meyers were seated!!)

Derek D Accepts the FLD Webby Award from Michelle DeForest on Vimeo.

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There are a few things that most of us at the company have in common: We like to have fun, we wish we were rock stars (well, we’re already rock stars, but I mean actual rock stars), we love movies, and we are superhero fanatics!
To my delight, I was able to catch the Superhero Fashion & Fantasy exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend (which I highly suggest), and it reminded me of a fantastic series that I saw a trailer for a few months ago.

Italian Spiderman Trailer

Italian Superman was something of a mystery to me after I watched the trailer. I thought it was a brilliant, campy one-off, and nothing more. To my surprise, I saw an episode featured on Yahoo! Video last week, and was psyched to find the first two episodes up on YouTube, MySpace, and Yahoo!. The story that accompanies it is just as outlandish as the series, explaining that Italian Spiderman was adapted from the novel, Death Wears A Hat, and filmed in 1964 by Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Gatti, and produced by Alrugo Entertainment.
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I’m pumped for next week. Why? It’s Internet Week in NYC! Imagine SXSW Interactive, minus the panels, and set in the most lively city in the US. Sure it’s a bonus that I live here, and I have an excellent excuse to hit the parties at night and come in to the work late, but correct me if I’m wrong, NYC seems like a perfect setting for celebrating what we are all devoting our careers to try and make the most of.

*Brief History Lesson* It all started when the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting called up the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (aka the Academy behind the Webby Awards), and asked them to help rally companies to throw parties and make their meetups and conferences a part of the festivities.

The events start this Tuesday, June 3, and run through Tuesday, June 10 concluding with the Webby Awards Gala. And in case you hadn’t heard, Fast Lane Daily picked up a Webby Award so we’re ready to celebrate BIG TIME!

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I’m a sucker for a good mash-up or remix. OK, really I’m just a sucker for music. Add a kickin’ soundtrack to any video footage, and all the sudden, “it’s my favorite video, ever!” Now Weezer’s put their spin on the “mash-up/remix” for their latest single Pork and Beans. They’ve basically pulled an Internet People, and paid homage to a TON of our favorite YouTube stars! (Weezer has even released footage from the shoot featuring Kelly and Dan!)

What a smart move on their part! Nothing gets the “viral” web going like engaging the community that promulgates it. And seriously, who wouldn’t want to help out Weezer? While you try to name all the web stars in this video, I’ll leave you with a few other super-sweet remixes and mash-ups. And if you have a favorite, link it up in the comments!

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Have you ever watched Indy Mogul and thought to yourself, “Hey, this Erik guy is one sharp looking dude”? Well, you’re not the only one. Daisy Whitney from TV Week thinks so too. She’s compiled a list of The Hottest Male Web Hosts, and our very own Erik Beck is up against Eric Gunnar Rochow from Greenhouse. So if you’ve ever entertained those thoughts, now is the time to let those feelings rush forth. Vote Now! Polling ends Friday, May 2nd.

GO ERIK!

To paraphrase an old blues, “it’s been a good year, but a long year.”

15 networks launched, YouTube’s #1 content partner, 100+ video views. Colleagues in New York and across the country, viewers and friend across the globe. Whew!

I’ve been lucky enough to be part of a number of once-in-a-lifetime experiences during my life. All year I’ve known Next New Networks is one of them.

It’s hard for any of us here at Next New Networks to figure that it’s only been a year since we ‘officially’ opened. Sure, for the founders we’ve been at work getting the company together for twice as long, but we started bringing on our colleagues last January and I, for one (though I know we all heartily agree), have to marvel at what they’ve all accomplished. Like any start up everyone here came into an office space that was literally being built while the work was trying to make sense of itself, and we were trying to explain exactly what the company was up to and what a specific job would entail (we’re still working on that). And even as the paint was going on the walls and the computers were being debugged, we were launching networks and cajoling communities of viewers to come take a look.

We couldn’t have even begun without an incredible group of investors and board members who’ve become Next New Networks’ friends, advertisers who’ve kicked the tires and bought a ride, and a large audience of loyal viewers who’ve spread the word in every way now known to humankind.

More’s coming, good stuff too, I assure you.

Thanks everyone –our colleagues, our investors and board members, and our audiences– for an awesome first year. Here’s to hundreds more.

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.

Steve Woolf (the sometimes BTS half of the Epic-FU neé Jetset team) wrote this smart and insightful post on their record breaking 3,000,000+ episode on the smashface productions blog:

A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.

We’re obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It’s gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.

What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.

For one thing, we’ve been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video’s explosive views. But we didn’t have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.

Another possible factor is that we always place a frame strategically in the exact middle of the upload so that when YouTube generates its preview thumbnail, prospective viewers are given a sense of the tone and personality of the show when reviewing the myriad choices for them to watch. However this image is quite small, and some videos that typically experience large view numbers have scantily clad women or mainstream celebrities as their preview image. Our preview image of this video is shown at left.

Then there’s the title of the video: taking no sh1t, internet love song, writer’s guild. A very typical title for us since we cover so much ground in each episode. It’s somewhat provocative, but is definitely less so than many other videos.

Finally we come to the content of the video. We touched on a number of politically charged stories that engendered a great deal of discussion in the comments under the video. In particular we said some things about the Writer’s Guild of America strike that is currently taking place. These statements seemed to provoke a really strong reaction from many viewers on both sides of the issue. Given the timing of the strike and the topical nature of the commentary in our video, this seems to be a strong factor in people watching the video and then passing it along to their friends to see, which is the really important factor in generating huge view numbers.

So without getting more scientific about it, it seems like we had a combination of factors that led to the breakout number of views. Good title, solid preview image, passionate existing fanbase, and provocative content. This is the kind of formula we strive to have in every show so that when the opportunity comes along to be promoted on a place like the YouTube home page, we are able to take maximum advantage of that exposure.

Are there any other major factors that I’ve missed? Why do you think this video has 4X the number of views of any other EPIC-FU video on YouTube?

Super Steve Woolf 

Early last summer, Steve and Zadi from Jetset showed us all at Next New Networks just how easy it was to use Ning to set up a specialized social network. My partner Tim Shey was the only one of us to take the bait and one night in August he delivered on a vision we’d been talking about at Channel Frederator and popped up Channel Frederator RAW, another one of our ‘firsts,’ this time the world’s first social network just for animation.

We quietly started mentioning RAW on our blogs, and eventually asked for a few members, to see whether the thing had any legs. At first I thought I’d send out a wider invitation after 100 members, but things being as busy as they were I never got around to it. Over this past weekend I’d friended my 200th RAW friend and realized it was now or never. So, the previews are over, we’re on Broadway.

At 3pm ET today I sent out a note to a select list of filmmakers, artists, and fans, people in our community we’d been in contact with for years. As of five minutes ago we’d increased the size of our network by almost 50% and the action on the site has perked up 10-fold. More art, more video, and most gratifying of all, more conversation is going on between animation people across five continents.

Thanks Steve, thanks Zadi, thanks Tim. Most of all, thanks to our new members (some cool icons they have above, yes?). I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves.