Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

A belated congrats to our friends Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, of Ask a Ninja fame, who will be writing, and Kent directing, a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. I was lucky enough to be standing with Kent when the news broke on The Hollywood Reporter, not because we hang out all the time (although I wish we could), but because of a happy coincidence, as Kent had stopped by our SXSW party that night. I’m sure I was one of the first of many people to freak out and congratulate him that night and the following days — making the jump from web auteurship to a feature film deal is a huge achievement.

Kent and Doug are heroes of ours, and we’ve gotten friendly over the past year or so, especially after both they and Fred spoke at Pixelodeon last year, delivering two of the renegade keynotes of the festival. They’re legendary in the web video space for being one of the few web productions that’s in the black, attracting a year-long sponsorship / revenue sharing deal (which they just renewed) with Federated Media, and smartly merchandising and licensing with an Ask a Ninja book, t-shirts and clothing, and DVDs. What I love about Kent and Doug is that they aim high and know the value of where they are right know, and the knowledge they have. They’ll be keeping the Ninja going, showing the common sense that in Hollywood translates to cunning business savvy. As Kent writes on his blog:

This move is about career. Going into movies gives us access to the top of the Hollywood food chain. Show business is still an aspirational place — web shows want to be cable shows. Cable shows want to be broadcast shows. And broadcast shows want to be films. (And I guess now, films want to be Broadway musicals, but that’s a different story…)

By going to straight to features, the entire showbiz world is still open to us. We’ll be able to move freely up and down the aspirational chain without being pigeonholed as the web guys. And actually we’ll be even more valuable since we have a deep understanding of the new media landscape.

Kent’s right. This is awesome news. And if anyone thinks otherwise, The Ninja will totally kill them.

Moblogic.tv is live today, and our friends at CBS Interactive — the producing team that brought you Wallstrip — really knock it out of the park with an unique, well-paced show and a brilliantly executed website with a big, beautiful (Blip) Flash player and a design that makes sharing and stealing the show easy. We’ll be watching and taking notes - I already see much I want to steal (we’ve been moving in similar directions — check, for instance, the redesigned Veracifier website). Congratulations to Lindsay, Adam and Jeff, who have been working hard on this show for quite a while.

If you’re in Austin for SXSW, be sure to check out Lindsay on my panel, Quit Your Day Job and Vlog, where we’ll hear how she got into vlogging, and what it’s been like for her to make the jump from indie Wallstrip host to producing a daily news show for CBS.

Here’s the first episode, below.

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.

What a difference a year makes. I first got to meet Jeff and Adam from Wallstrip back at the beginning of February, when we were getting ready to launch Next New Networks, and a lot of the same things were on our minds. At the time, I was already a fan of the show, but I hadn’t yet met Howard, who sounded from their description like the Wizard of Oz, or Lindsay, who just seemed too perfect a host to be real.

As we got to know each other, the natural inclination was to see if we could all work together, and believe me, I hoped they’d join forces with us at Next New Networks — but a bigger suitor was soon calling, and most people reading this blog know about the incredible move they made to CBS.

It’s been a lot of fun to be running parallel ships here in New York this year; I feel like they’re the family next door, and it’s always great to have one of them drop in and catch up. Jeff and Adam coincidentally hired a close family friend of mine, Terrence Elenteny, whom I’ve known since he was probably twelve years old, to their production team at CBS; Howard’s become a wizard to us as well, introducing us, for instance, to Ben Relles of Barely Political; and we’re now lucky to count Lindsay as a friend as well, and been able to confirm that yes, she actually is real.

Even though I know the people behind the curtain now, I still get just as big a kick out of their show, and get a little jealous when they do a particularly good one — which is all the time. Watching their 2007 wrap up video, it’s obvious that they’re still working insanely hard and having a lot of fun — and that’s a lot to be proud of. Congrats to the family down the road, and wishing you all even more success in 2008.

It’s with great sadness that we heard from Brian Conley at Alive in Baghdad that Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, who was to be a new correspondent for the show, was killed in his home in Baghdad a week ago.

There are no words that can do justice to the simple fact that in that part of the world, people are dying as they try to exercise a right we take for granted — simply to report and comment on their own lives — and that another family has lost a son.

You can give money to help Ali’s surviving family at the AiB website, and you can also help support Alive in Baghdad’s work with a donation or subscription.

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 

Justin Johnson, the very first hire at Next New Networks, doesn’t get enough credit for being one of the first videobloggers — he put up Vidblogs.com back in 2004. So it’s especially fun that this weekend at Boston PodCamp, Justin met up for the first time with our friend Steve Garfield, the person most often credited with being the world’s first videoblogger. Today, Steve interviewed Justin as well as Erik Beck (who recently moved to New York to work full time on Indy Mogul and I’m sure many other good things to come) for a live webcast on Blog.tv — the archived interview is embedded below.

How great are Justin and Erik? By the way, one more thing Justin needs credit for: he described his job here as “making all the promos,” but Justin’s also one of the key creative minds with Erik behind Indy Mogul, as well as our new network Ultra Kawaii, where he’s collaborating with another pioneering videoblogger, Josh Leo, and his friend Dave Seger. Justin really won’t rest until all his friends have jobs here at NNN.

So, as you might have heard, just shy of two years from launch, it’s Channel Frederator’s 100th episode. And I wanted to say “Thanks” to our loyal fans.

From day one, our viewers are the ones we’ve built “Cartoon Central on the Internet” around; they’ve called the phone lines, left comments, and voted for their favorites. They’re the reason we’re here and we all appreciate it more than we can say.

Among the home team I’d like to tip a hat to the hard working colleagues I have who get the work done whether I’m here, not here, or physically here but not mentally. Eric, Carrie, Mike, Lee, Dan, Jeaux, Scott, oh man, you make it all work fantastically. We’re all lucky you’re so talented. (Melissa, you’re not here anymore, but you too, thanks.)

Everyone at Next New Networks work their butts off to super distribute and promote your cartoons to over 4.9mm video views last month alone! And that includes our NNN investors, your faith in our vision makes the difference.

David, thanks for pushing us into the world’s original cartoon podcast. You changed our lives.

And Emil, there’s nothing too big to say to you. You’re my first, and deepest, interactive mentor. And friend. Thanks bud.

The ever-brilliant Micki Krimmel has written an extensive post on WorldChanging about the current online video landscape, and turned in possibly the only thoughtful and appropriate response I’ve seen so far to the news recently reported that our friend Amanda Congdon and ABC won’t be continuing their relationship for another year.

Micki’s best point is that the online video landscape has evolved and grown so much in the past year, it’s almost useless now to draw conclusions about the viability of the industry based on any one person’s career choices — though I’d add it was pretty useless more than a year ago, when people were using Amanda’s departure from Rocketboom for their own axes to grind about videoblogging and its emerging personalities — many of them were painfully wrong when they made predictions then about her or the medium’s prospects, and I think there’s a good chance many of them are wrong now.

Amanda’s taken a lot of shots by virtue of being one of the first breakout videobloggers to get a lot of mainstream media attention, which these days happens a lot more often than it did a year ago. I know that I’m obviously biased as a known conspirator of Amanda’s, but no one’s written much yet about what a challenging gig she took on at ABC, and how amazing it is that she worked for a year with them at all. I’ve watched and sometimes commiserated with her in open admiration as she forged her way with ABC — a company I’ve done some work with, and know how long it can take to change, for many good and understandable reasons — and as she helped push through a lot of positive change in that organization.

Before Abcnews.com/Amanda, there was no video content on the site simultaneously available via RSS feeds and iTunes podcasts, no flash players with pause buttons, user comments on videos, or regular interaction with the viewer community in every episode. Not to mention that there were no videobloggers working in mainstream media, and covering stories that viewers asked them to do, or soliciting their participation in making the show. The thought of a major news organization like ABC supporting anything like that format for a year, much less getting those changes made within a year, is mind-boggling, if you take a step back from it. Lots of things that have followed, like Wallstrip joining CBS, JETSET joining us at Next New, and the increasing amounts of latitude they’ve each had to make their shows succeed in their new homes, all followed a path pioneered by Amanda.

(Photo by Amanda)

If people want to critique what could have been done better, they should. I’ve always felt that the show was underserved by a poorly designed website and intrusive ad model that made it difficult to watch and interact with, though the podcast remedied some of that for me. For that, we can’t really fault Amanda, who maintains a beautifully simple and easy to use website for her personal videoblog. ABC needs to improve this if they want to build viewership on the web — and new initiatives like the great work being done by ABC Family show that they know it. But at the same time, Amanda and ABC should be applauded for an experiment that’s made both of them smarter — it made a lot of sense for both at the time, and they’re both well-positioned to do even better things next as a result.

We had a pretty good idea that when we launched our first Channel Frederator original series (and the first original animated series distributed by Next New Networks) that it would go viral pretty quickly. But, here we are less than 12 hours later with over 200,000, thousands of comments, and five star ratings. I think it’s far to say that creator Dan Meth will himself now join the exalted ranks of the internet people.

A few of the comments:

“I’ve seen all these videos… I don’t know if I should feel great or terrible.”

“noooooo!!! not chuck norris!”

And then, there’s the response video from our friends at Indy Mogul:

Dan Meth is one amazing filmmaker. Thanks bud.