Well over a year ago, the online video component of this election season kicked into high gear when an independent individual with some professional political advertising experience created a media frenzy with his “Hillary 1984″ ad, a repurposing of Apple’s Super Bowl commercial from the ’80s.

Now, with the election just a week away, we’ve come full circle with two more ads from Super Bowls past revamped for online political purposes. Office Linebacker “Terrible” Terry Tate has returned to put the hurt on fools who don’t vote, while the “Wassup” guys have suffered every great malady our nation has gone through over the last eight years.

Neither ad makes mention of their original product — Terry was doing his tackling in Reeboks while the “Wassup” boys swigged Budweiser — but both use their reference ad’s existing storyline to push a new, political agenda. Both ads bring back original cast members and riff on the same jokes they did years ago. But it’s no longer the go-go early aughts, and the ads have lost their carefree tone.

The message seems to be: Forget beer and sneakers, even the guys from those silly Superbowl ads are paying attention to this election. Are you?

While online video has done much to connect the world by allowing us to share our stories with one another, we often enjoy the tales in front of our computer screens, alone. What if the connective and collective experience of enjoying a film could unite people across the world and the web? That is documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim’s goal with this Saturday’s Pangea Day, an event in which 24 different films from all over the world can be viewed in person, online, on TV and on your mobile phone.

Noujaim first presented her idea to Al Gore at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival; in 2006, she was awarded a TED Prize to fulfill her wish of bringing the world together for one day a year through the power of film. It’ll be like a multicultural celebration of the human spirit, akin to Al Gore’s decadent Live Earth concert series, but with fewer self-absorbed rock stars.

Now Nokia and Gore’s own Current have come on board to help collect and disseminate stories. Noujaim spoke to NewTeeVee in New York this week amid last-minute preparations. Read more of this story

Online video is perfectly suited for investigative journalism pieces. It’s just as easy to go out into the field with camera in hand as it is with a tape recorder, and now the final product is no longer limited to the written word but can hit viewers with video and audio as well. On Skid Row, a new five-part series from GOOD and MySpace, takes the cameras into the seedy side of Los Angeles, exploring the issue of homelessness among the 9,000 vagrant bodies in L.A.’s 50 square-block Skid Row.

GOOD, a year-old multimedia company with a print magazine, has produced numerous excellent video shorts, which we’ve profiled here, but On Skid Row is the most ambitious and longest video project they’ve undertaken to date. GOOD is quickly supplanting Current as my top pick for an engaged, multimedia source of information and entertainment. This new series shows that GOOD has got the journalistic chops to tackle complicated issues, and the fact that they are devoting five episodes to this single topic says that GOOD is willing to invest in bigger stories. Read more of this story

The Internet has been rife with skirmishes recently. And the battles have run the gamut, from the physical (those mysteriously slashed cables in Middle Eastern seas) to the theoretical (proposed Net Neutrality legislation on Capitol Hill) to the political (viral presidential propaganda). But the most significant example of a cyberspace movement crossing into meatspace was the digitally organized protest known as “Project Chanology” that the group Anonymous put on in front of Scientology churches all over the wired world.

It was just a few months ago that Anonymous was little more than a poorly understood online group of hacktivists. Then the Church of Scientology tried to force web sites to take down a video starring Scientology celebrity spokesperson Tom Cruise. Anonymous initially reacted with a petty distributed denial-of-service attack on Scientology’s official web site, but it wasn’t long before the group issued a digital manifesto promising the dismantling of Scientology altogether. Then last week, Anonymous took to the streets, organizing physical protests in front of Scientology Churches all over the world. Read more of this story