For 24 hours today (starting midnight ET Oct 6), thanks to a promotional commitment from our sponsor, Starburst, our great animated series Nite Fite is being featured on the front page of YouTube in the upper-right spot usually reserved for advertiser videos, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Nite Fite is not a branded entertainment series, like many other videos that have appeared in that space. It’s a fully independently-owned show that has a standalone sponsor integration within each episode, not unlike Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Comedy and its sponsorship by Burger King. The Cavalcade is being distributed by a Google AdSense buy, just as we’re getting a distribution boost from our front page buy (which we fully expect to be effective, as the show is good enough to have viewers then rate it, share it, and forward it along). I think it’s a tremendously innovative way for an advertiser to get their messaging out to the YouTube audience. By embedding a sponsorship in a YouTube partner channel (in this case Channel Frederator) that already has a ton of credibility and love in the YouTube community (with over 20,000 subscribers and 13mm views), Starburst is promoting a great independent show that deserves a wider audience, and getting their sponsorship viewed at the same time.

As of now, the latest episode, “TV is Crap,” has been up for around 1424 hours, been viewed 120,000250,000 times, and is holding steady at a four-star rating, with comments from viewers like, “this is the first ad on youtube that was actually good,” and, “Finally, a sponsored video that’s actually funny.” But my favorite one of all is this one from Trayxx:

I just clicked in to this 45 minutes ago out of curiousity, now after watching all the eps I’m hooked! Great job and keep it up!

One of the smartest people I know in the space, 7 Robot’s Sarah Szalavitz, a programming advisor of ours and, along with Damien Somerset, one of the owner-producers of our hit show Zaproot, has long been saying that companies like ours should spend less on producing and more on promoting content. Today’s trial, the results of which we’ll share here later in the week, could be a great model, not unlike the Seth McFarlane deal, for tying sponsorship and promotion together to get great programming in front of a wider audience.

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.

What better way to celebrate than with a brand new Muppets video on the web?

Hope everyone’s chilling and having a nice break today.

Today marked the first year of Obama Girl’s term of office as reigning queen of political comedy on the web, since “I’ve Got a Crush… on Obama” first showed up on YouTube June 13, 2007. 100 Videos later, after over 50 million views and countless press stories, Barely Political has the #1 Most Viewed Video on YouTube again today, with a new rival for Obama Girl: the Incredible McCain Girl.

I think it’s some of the best work the Barely Political team has done — which has now grown to include the great preditor Tom Small, the hilarious writer and performer Rusty Ward, the still-rocking core team of Ben Relles, Leah Kaufman, and Amber Lee Ettinger, and new guys Mark Douglas and David Feingold. But they haven’t just been churning out Obama Girl videos and creating an increasingly weird and hilarious mythology for the characters, including OG’s alter-ego, Super Obama Girl — they’re also developing a truly unique brand of political satire with a YouTube aesthetic, with videos like Hillary Wasn’t Lying About Bosnia (by NNN’s Justin Johnson), Political Sex Scandals (a great Douglas / Kaufman collab) and a NNN staff favorite, Stimulus Package, where a couple of ’90’s rap rejects (played brilliantly by Ward and Douglas) fantasize about what mack daddies they’ll be with their $600 (embedded below, after the jump). Congrats to Ben, Amber, and Leah on a killer year, and thanks to everyone who’s helped expose the world to Barely Political, video after video, especially the Next New Networks team, YouTube, MSNBC, CNN and FOX News.

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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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or, What online video can learn from the coffee business.

There’s a pretty incredible thing happening in the coffee business here in New York and other cities all over the country — independent, locally-owned coffee shops are springing up that are giving Starbucks a run for their money by paying obsessive attention to quality of their product and creating a better, more unique experience than an international supercorporation possibly can.

I first noticed this in my own neighborhood when I wandered into Cafe Grumpy at a friend’s recommendation, or, more accurately, his obsession — he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Cafe Grumpy (their name is a poke at Starbucks baristas) (deleted, see Caroline’s comment below) started out in Brooklyn, then began conquering Chelsea with their ultra-fancy single-brew Clover coffee machines, which people obsess over; fair trade sourced and locally roasted coffee; and super-rich, hand-poured espresso drinks — no more expensive, and often cheaper, than the mass-produced ones at Starbucks — where they draw little designs with the foamed milk, part of a fun new trend called latte art. The coffee was noticeably tastier than most other cups I’d ever had, the place was cool and welcoming, and being the silly old hipster I am, I was soon hooked enough to start walking several blocks out of my way to stop in on my walks between home and work.

Sam pours up a cafe latte at Cafe Grumpy, from their Flickr stream.

But Cafe Grumpy’s just one example. Joe is opening shops all over the city, there’s the tiny Gimme Coffee in Soho and Brooklyn, Gorilla in Park Slope, and a couple Ninth Street Espresso locations, one of which broke off on its own as Everyman Espresso. In Los Angeles, there’s Groundwork coffee in Venice and Hollywood, my frequent hangout Kings Road, Intelligentsia (invading from Chicago), and the Latino-owned Sabor y Cultura. San Francisco’s got Ritual Roasters and Blue Bottle. In Austin, there’s the amazing Jo’s Coffee, creating some of the best new jobs for hipsters since Waterloo opened, and in Washington, D.C., there’s Tryst (their slogan: “no corporate coffee. no matching silverware”) and the fast-growing, famously black-owned Mayorga with over ten locations already. Many of these businesses are opening franchises in local airports and train stations — the places you’d expect to see yet another Starbucks — benefiting from programs to attract local businesses. And like Starbucks or Whole Foods’ Allegro team (a bunch of whom I met randomly last week in Austin, and who seemed uniformly passionate and smart), these businesses take personal pride in sharing the sourcing of their coffees, even visiting the growers and posting photos of their trips on Flickr.

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Along with what looked like a couple thousand other curious people from the online video, advertising, and marketing worlds, a group of us attended YouTube’s “Videocracy” advertiser upfront here in New York City Wednesday afternoon. A pretty massive production at NYC’s Terminal 5, it was also YouTube’s first real event of notice since the Google acquisition. YouTube pulled out all the stops, including an introduction from founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, testimonials from Tom Brady and Anderson Cooper (who showed up in person to talk about the YouTube-CNN debates), and a number of presentations about YouTube’s advertising initiatives, from their internal ad targeting and campaign creation system (called “Ginzu” — it slices, it dices…) to case studies from advertisers like HP, General Mills, and New Line, to their work with the IAB and sites like MySpace and Facebook to develop standards for video advertising. There’s a good recap on Ian Shafer’s blog. And of course — an eclectic mix of entertainment from some of YouTube’s biggest stars, including the Blendtec guy, singer Esmee Denters and Soulja Boy, who performed his ‘Crank that‘ song onstage that inspired tons of YouTube dance videos this year, which played in the background on a big screen.

YouTube set up a nice area for Rob and Corinne from ThreadBanger to meet advertisers and give demonstrations in the How-To pavilion of the event (near our friends from Make Magazine) - and incidentally, ThreadBanger’s featured on the front page of YouTube today for their special Valentine’s Day episode, so we’re appreciating two days of love.

While Rob and Corinne worked their magic (with Soulja Boy, I kid you not, crashed out on a nearby couch), we spent a good amount of time catching up with other people at the event, which included lots of agency and consumer brand contacts, execs from companies like Revision 3, Vuguru, and 60 Frames, and innovators of online video like Andrew Baron and Orrin Zucker. There was a moment when I looked around and realized the group of people standing together off to the side of the stage near me included Tay Zonday, Ian from Smosh, Lisa Nova, Michael Buckley and William Sledd — many of the individuals with the most subscribers on YouTube, standing for the moment incognito chatting together on the main floor, despite the millions who have watched their videos on the site. I thought of other upfronts I’ve attended, where the network stars would be carefully brought in and out of the crowd, and realized I’ll probably be looking back on that moment a few years from now as either the beginning, or the end, of something. Exactly which? Ask me next year.

update: Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman — whose advertising work I’m a big fan of — was at the event as well, and has posted some smart thoughts.