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.

Had a great time this week with the inimitable Steve and Zadi from JETSET here at the Next New offices. Look for some of the fruits of our combined labors next week on a couple of shows — until then, please come back soon, S + Z!

The N3 team came together this evening at BANC (read: BONK), for a much needed happy hour/mixer thing. I was pleasantly surprised to see that our turnout included both office denizens and network talent, compressed into one small corner bar with an open tab.

Oh well, concessions must be made (get it?) for these exceedingly important instances of human ingenuity and engineering.

Check out the full photo gallery on Flickr.

Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith just made the jump from NNN intern to Veracifier Community Manager, though that’s a story for someone else to tell in this space. Raleigh is a veteran of the same college radio station that started me off working in media, and it got me to thinking what a great impact that particular version of the medium has had on my personal media world.

Just at Next New Networks, in addition to me, CEO Herb Scannell, producer Alan Kaufman, and legal consultant Roy Langbord worked in their college stations (there might be a few more I don’t know about); heck, it was a meeting I had with Herb as he was graduating that started our professional friendhip. And tons of others I’ve worked with regularly over the years (I know I’ll leave a lot out) include my former partner Alan Goodman, NY networking maven Bill Sobel, even my wife, in addition to dozens of screenwriters, movie directors and producers, and executives.

Albie Hecht is one of my best friends –ah, one of our best friends; all of the Next New partners have worked together with Albie a lot over the years– his company World Wide Biggies –”a New York-based developer of digital entertainment for kids, families and young adults”– has just announced the opening of a digital production studio, an investment raise of $9million, and distribution deals. His partners include co-leaders NBC Universal and Platform Equity, and Hearst Corp., Greycroft Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. Wow.

Nobody’s going to beat Albie and his great team (including our other close friend, and I might add, my first creative hire in television, Scott Webb), nobody. They were early media converts to the transformative power of the interactive digital world’s effect on the traditional television business.

Albie’s one of the cultural stars of the last dozen years. As Herb’s President of Nickelodeon Entertainment produced an unending string of hits like the humngo series and movie SpongeBob SquarePants, the $100 million movies of A Series of Unfortunate Events and Rugrats, and lately Nick’s runaway success The Naked Brothers Band. And Scott was Nickelodeon’s innovative Worldwide Creative Director for several years; you’ll remember, among other things, his sheparding of the truly original series Pete & Pete, and his mid-90s foresight to be an early internet pioneer with the creation of Nickelodeon Online.

Did I mention that nobody’s going to beat Albie? Congratulations to the Biggies.

As seems to be more usual this year than I’d like, I’m a little behind in catching up with some of my guests.

Recently I had a great visit getting to know Joshua Cohen and Jamison Tilsner of Tilzy.TV, one of the great new resouces for internet television. As you might imagine, all of us at Next New Networks are rooting for their success. They’ve got a quality product so far, and I’m sure it’s just the beginning.

I’ve known Gary Cohen of Triple Threat Television for years; he was the early supporter of my great friend Jon Kane of FischerSpooner and bunker. He came by with his colleague Andrew Gautier to catch up with me and get the word on Next New Networks. Maybe there’s something we’ll be able to do together.

If you love modern popular music, you probably know it wouldn’t exist as we know it –no Artic Monkeys, no John Coltrane, no nothing– without New Orleans.

I’ve written quite a bit since 2005 about the tragedy that befell the United States while Hurricane Katrina hit and our government bungled the chance to save a great American region.

And I posted once about the graphic art that’s been created to help donate funds to help the rebuidling, but I’ve only glanced upon the personal part of me that resonates with New Orleans, and that’s the musical culture.

Briefly: Tipitina’s was set up by some music fans to provide a place for piano legend Professor Longhair to perform in his later years. Bad business met good intentions and the place almost went under until a good samartian resurrected the joint in the mid-90s. Katrina almost put it down for the count with the rest of the area but our samaritan instead set up Tipitina’s Foundation to help the city’s most important asset, it’s musicians. You can read more in detail about the foundation’s work here.

The point? Please donate to Tipitina’s Foundation. The tragedy is not over by a long shot –it won’t be for most of our lifetimes– and any help you can give will help. If you love music, this should be an easy check to write.

Just had to post this because it’s so darn cool. Our friend Lan Bui of Noodlescar greatness made this killer video of photographs he took during this weekend’s Comic Con. Keep an eye out for NNN peeps like Zadi from JETSET and Casey and Justin from Pulp Secret, and frequent JETSET correspondent (and Noodlescar host) Bonny, Lan’s muse and partner in crime.

Click To Play

p.s. Happy belated birthday, Lan! (You can see Bonny with cupcakes in the early photos.)

Halley Suitt and Steve Garfield stopped by Next New today with Steve’s friend and collaborator David Tamés and hung out with me and the N-Bot for a while (photo by Steve, plus here’s another). It was fun to show Steve around especially — he’s sort of the vlogfather of our operation, thanks to his infectious advocacy for the medium of videoblogging, which has gotten untold numbers of people to pick up their cameras and make something.

I’ve known Steve for a while now thanks to his number one fan Amanda and his work on Rocketboom and Vlog Soup, two of the first videoblogs I saw that started to look like a new kind of popular entertainment, maybe even a revolution. Halley I’ve known just about as long, though I first met her when I was recruiting bloggers to work with ClubMom and she was CEO of Top Ten Sources (and nicely put ClubMom’s founder Andrew Shue on the front page). Now Halley’s mentioning a new company called ZINDICATE on places like LinkedIn and TechCrunch, and judging from the company she’s keeping, I think it’s safe to say Halley’s going to be bringing those smarts to online video. Good — we need it!

Saw via Bijan’s blog that our friends (and office mates) at Davidville made Time’s Top 50 Websites list for their Tumblr tool.

All of us at Next New are big fans of Tumblr and use it for many of our personal blogs, and it’s been fun for me to see Tumblr evolve over the past year from a sparkle in David’s eye to the phenomenon it is today. Congrats, guys! (Also fun: they’re right ahead of Twitter.)