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!

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.

Alan reworked an earlier promo he’d made for Fast Lane Daily to celebrate our imminent milestone of 100 million video views in our first year — you can watch it embedded above on our blog or check it out here.

As of December 23, as you can see from the sidebar on our blog, we’re just over 97 million views, and that’s without a full count yet of some of our podcast downloads or partner views that tend to come in less than real time. I think we’ll make it, so I don’t actually advocate the kinds of shenanigans in this video, but if you’d like to help, blog some of your favorite videos, send them to your friends, and you can help push us over the top!

At this point, I’m not going for 100 million — I want to see how far over 100 million we can get by the end of the year!

Hope everyone had a happy holiday…

[Guest blogger! Today Josh Leo joins us from Ultra Kawaii — and we hope to see more of our network producers blogging here soon. — tim]

Ultra Kawaii, NNN’s cute pet network, is joining the growing lineup of online programming available on Tivo! Starting today, you can get you fill of some of the internet’s cutest animals right on your TV. Cuteness is something that everyone, everywhere can enjoy, so we are really happy to have this opportunity to reach a larger audience!

Not familliar with Ultra Kawaii? Well here is the quick run-down: “Kawaii” is Japanese for cute. But Ultra Kawaii is more than just a cute kitten here and there. It is a barrage of cuteness that doesn’t even give you time to breathe! On Ultra Kawaii, Dave and Myself try to distill cute moments caught on video down to a concentrated dose of Kawaii. We usually try to focus each video on a specific theme, this week is the very festive “Let’s Eat!” episode just in time for the American gorge-fest that is Thanksgiving! If your pet is dying to be a star, or if you have an idea for a theme for an episode, just let any of us at Ultra Kawaii know. We love viewer input and we hope that you enjoy the cute!

With so much going on, it’s hard to take a minute to stop and blog the moments along the way. However, we’ve got to congratulate Josh Marshall, TPM, and our team here at Veracifier, who are having their best week ever.

It all started when an eagle eyed member of the TPMtv team posted some video of John McCain not exactly chastising a questioner who called our possible next President an unflattering world. That video’s here, if you didn’t happen to catch it.

By that afternoon, the video was the top story on the front page of AOL and our channel had racked up about a million extra views — in one day — on both YouTube and our site. To date, there are now over 1600 comments on YouTube, over 15,000 comments on AOL, and the story keeps rolling.

Oh, and especially fun for all of us — all the attention made Veracifier the #1 most viewed channel on YouTube for the day:

What’s especially interesting is that this was video footage the entire media corps had access to; our lean operation with TPM pays a modest fee to get clean access to video footage such as this from some of the same providers who provide to C-SPAN. As we noticed once before with the Rose Garden Long Shot incident, often the key to good TV online is just about finding the right stuff at the right time, and making it more available than anyone else. Great job, Josh, Ben, Marc, and everyone else on Veracifier. (And thanks to David Levin at Brainstorm for the heads-up.)

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.

Ahoy, bilge rats! In observation of International Talk Like a Pirate Day 2007, Next New Networks will be beginning and ending all office correspondences with pirate terminology. So grab some grog ye salty dogs, because today the pirates have landed!

Arrrrgghh!

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.

As noted recently on Zeigen, Tivo Lovers, and the Tivo Blog, fans of Next New Networks can now get their Channel Frederator fix as a TiVo Season Pass. But not just Frederator — Fast Lane Daily, Indy Mogul, ThreadBanger, Pulp Secret, JETSET, VOD Cars and Veracifier have all recently launched TiVoCasts.

They’re accessible via your TiVo remote menu, or right on the TiVo website. We’ll be adding more networks over the next couple of weeks, as well as adding TiVo one-click subscribe buttons to our websites. Check it out!

I’ve been fortunate to sit in close proximity of our interns for some time now and I have to say, we hit the jackpot with this bunch. In fact, they’re so committed to N3, our staff often confuses them for employees. Though their ages and backgrounds run the gamut, all have brought their strengths and experiences to our office and we couldn’t be luckier. Some have even parlayed their roles into a full-time gig, but I’ll get to that later.

Our first crop of Next New interns were given a unique assignment this summer; to create their own network. They had roughly six weeks to come up with a concept, shoot the footage, post it on YouTube and generate the most views along with win over a committee made up of our staff. Five individuals took us up on our challenge and produced the following networks:

Sasha Levenson-Wahl’s- Pet Hot Spots

Nick Bonadies-VOD Recruit

Terry Quire’s- Hypeline Movies

Steve Nelson’ Improv Island

Omar Padilla’s-Blisterpoppers

A varied array of submissions, yet in the end, Omar Padilla wound up taking home the prize. Blisterpoppers is a network devoted to the community who collect action figures and as I’ve recently learned is a big business. Congratulations Omar!

From this class of interns, we recently snagged three to join our staff permanently. Lee Rubenstein had been interning with Channel Frederator for the past 18 months and recently came on as a production designer. Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith has worked on Veracifier and has joined as their network community manger, while Steve Nelson has easily made the transition from production intern to p.a. While we’ve regretfully had to return some to their respective schools, I’m glad to say we’ll be keeping some familiar faces around here.