The team over at VoteforChange.com is running a campaign to get online video creators to help spread the word about their site, which is simple and easy to use, and could literally help you find out whether you’re registered to vote, where your polling place is, or how to vote absentee in the time it took you to read this sentence.

Here’s a video that our own Derek D and Alan Kaufman made for Fast Lane Daily:

The site was built by Barack Obama’s campaign as a non-partisan effort aimed at making voting easy, so it’s worth using no matter who you’re voting for.

Time is running out — in most states, registration deadlines hit around the end of next week. Blog the link, tell your friends, and if you make a video promoting Vote for Change, let us know — we’ll post them here, and run the best ones in some of our shows.

We already love Jay Leno for appearing for a week on Fast Lane Daily, and NBC for featuring Obama Girl (aka Amber Lee Ettinger) on Saturday Night Live, so it’s only natural that Amber showed up again as “the one person whose endorsement really matters” in Mo Rocca’s report from the DNC on Tuesday’s Tonight Show. The full clip’s embedded below.

Thanks again, Jay and NBC!

It was a great weekend for politics here at NNN. This weekend we were all over the moon to see our very own Amber Lee Ettinger aka Obama Girl make a cameo in the opening of Saturday Night Live’s return episode after the Writer’s Strike. To quote Barely Political’s creator Ben Relles it was ‘beyond exciting’. Great job Amber and Ben.

And as the icing on the cake Noam Cohen in the New York Times did a great piece on Josh Marshall today and his winning of a George Polk Award. As soon as bloggers are considered, we know Josh will be up for a Pulitzer.

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.

I know people love Obama Girl, but today it hit new heights — Amber’s made the front page of Newsweek.com and MSN.com with Barely Political’s latest video, Super Obama Girl, released today.

This is not a doctored image — the video’s embedded right on the front page as an exclusive, along with a Newsweek interview with Amber.

Brian Braiker of Newsweek writes — again, this is an actual quote:

Watch as Super Obama Girl, blasted by the senator’s ray of hope, does battle with the “forces of darkness,” which apparently include both Chuck Norris and Bill Clinton… It’s enough to make you, regardless of your politics, pray for an Obama victory — and four more years of Ettinger.

I can’t add anything, except… wow. Ben, Amber and Leah, you’ve done it yet again. Here’s the video.

Globo reporter Lilía Teles in the Next New Networks studio

Reporters from Globo, Brazil’s largest TV network (and one of the largest TV networks in the world, watched by 80 million people daily) visited the Next New Networks offices yesterday and aired a segment about Barely Political on their national news broadcast (corresponding article).

There’s footage from Next New Networks and quotes from our own Portuguese speaker/secret weapon Ramon De Souza, who produces for Barely Political and other networks.

While the rest of the blogosphere is breathlessly covering CES, Jackson West over at NewTeeVee took some time to highlight the incredible work The Uptake and Veracifier are doing, along with other videobloggers like Steve Garfield and Debate Porridge, covering the primary election season, something we wrote about here last week. Our own Marc Boxser is quoted:

“We are probably, for video coverage, in 2008 … what 2004 was for blogs,” Next New Network’s (NNN) Mark Boxser told me over the phone. Boxser, who manages Veracifier for NNN, further pointed out that the site had the second most-viewed channel on YouTube yesterday, with hundreds of thousands of views spread over multiple updates, beating CBS.

A screenshot of Veracifier early Wednesday morning, already the third-most viewed channel on YouTube.

The great angle in the article is the way everyone is partnering to cover the stories, highlighting an example where Steve Garfield wandered around with a Nokia cellphone, streamed stories live, then Chuck Olsen edited Steve’s footage into a story that was both broadcast live on TheUptake’s Mogulus feed and released as a Veracifier “Ground Hounds” report. Jackson quotes Mary Matthews from Debate Porridge: “It’s not a competition with us,” she said. “[Not] yet, anyway… If [online media makers] go the way of television and the advertisers, and be beholden to the money, then it’s just going to be television on the Internet.”

I think it’s a long way off before things get competitive in the way anyone might fear. If the growth of blogs as news media says anything, it’s that featuring the best reporting and commentary, wherever it comes from, and serving your audience above everything else is the way to win online. And many, including the gang here at Next New Networks, would argue that’s the trick to programming good news content in any medium.

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.

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.

Who would have thought that Election ‘08 would be sexy, funny and cool — and it’s still ‘07? Our friend Ben Relles, that’s who.

He’s the mastermind behind BarelyPolitical.com’s Obama Girl, the viral video phenom that made loving Obama something more than sticking a bumper sticker on your car or a pin in your lapel. Ben’s back with more political love as his new video features “Giuliani Girl”, who’s got it for a former NYC mayor whose chrome dome is now, well, sexy to somebody. Better yet, the video features Giuliani Girl meeting Obama Girl in a “Beat it” face-off that’s a hoot.

Ben’s onto something with his unique twist of bringing politics into the pop culture discussion and his ambitions for BarelyPolitical.com are to keep the discussion fresh and funny. I’d bet on Ben to do it… and do it again. There’s a lot more smart, funny, sexy satire in Ben’s brain, and politics will never look so good.