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?

How’s an avid online video watcher supposed to get the latest episodes without leaving the computer on all the time? A new chipset from Intel might solve this problem, and save some energy (I’m repping NewTeeVee sister site Earth2Tech here), by allowing media providers to wake your snoozing PC up and automatically download fresh content. A new motherboard from the chip giant allows for Remote Wake technology without any extra cards or chipsets. Intel has already partnered with several media providers, including place-and-time shifting media manager Cyberlink, VoIP provider JAJAH, media manager Orb and P2P provider Pando.

Combining this hardware feature with a variety of content providers will allow users to remotely wake their PC and start downloading video so it will be ready and waiting when they get home. Once the download is complete the computer will nod back off to sleep, overall saving a bit of power, the companies claim. Intel expects to start shipping the new motherboards next month.

The service could allow for periodical content you subscribe to, like TV shows, to be automatically pushed to your PC so that the whole show is there and downloaded as soon as possible. While streaming is getting faster all the time, having the latest content from your favorite subscriptions proactively pushed out to your PC could be convenient. It’s annoying when you’re trying to sync your mobile device one last time before running out the door only to discover that your computer hasn’t pulled down the last night’s episodes yet. And as Om points out, with your PC increasingly becoming a media hub for your whole home, this “could make Pando quite viable as a desktop-oriented content delivery network.”

It’s not clear how much energy this will actually save and it will only work with the purchase of new Intel hardware, but we’re glad hardware and software makers are taking note of consumers’ concerns over energy consumption. And any services that encourage people to make better use of their existing power management settings are welcome additions. When Pando wakes your computer up remotely it doesn’t turn on your monitor and automatically turns your audio off, saving energy and preventing your roommate from suspecting a ghost in the machine.

Image courtesy of Pando.

It’s hard to believe that Ze Frank’s the show ended well over a year ago. Nothing has filled the void Ze left when his quirky, participatory video show stopped beaming power moves and duckies into our lives daily (though many have tried). Which leaves us wondering, what has Ze Frank been up to? We discovered part of the answer from Frank’s recent appearance on NPR’s radio show, The Sound of Young America (embedded below). Turns out Frank has plied his internet fame into a full blown deal to write a movie for Universal Studios that he’s finishing now.

We knew Frank had signed with United Talent Agency, had pitched a sitcom to CBS that didn’t get picked up, and was working on feature films. As Frank tells the show’s host Jesse Thorn, he flew to Hollywood and made the rounds taking meetings all around town. But half year went by without much progress, Frank says, before he got a deal with Universal. Now the videoblogger is finishing a movie script co-written with South Park writer Erica Rivinoja.

Frank is not alone in jumping from the computer screen to the silver screen. Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, the duo behind Ask A Ninja, are remaking Attack of the Killer Tomatoes for producer M. Dal Walton III, the mastermind behind Day of the Dead and Terror Train remakes. Just this week the Hollywood Reporter reported HomestarRunner co-founder Craig Zobel will re-write and direct Loudermilk starring Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder.

But traditional media is still trying to get its head around “new media” and it’s clear that new media stars often have difficulty transitioning the other way. Speaking frankly of his experience trying to get into old media, Frank said “I don’t know if there’s a place for me quite yet, but I really do hope there is.” We hope so too, but if not, we’ll always be here for you on the tubes, Ze.

The wonderfully nerdy fruits of the writers guild strike are starting to ripen. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon started writing a three-part musical Internet series during the strike with his brothers and the result, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, is coming to soon to a computer near you. The teaser trailer just “leaked” yesterday and is full of fanboy fodder.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Dr. Horrible has high production values and an allstar cast including Niel Patrick Harris as the low-budget villain, The Guild’s Felicia Day as my his love interest and Nathan Fillion of Whedon’s Firefly as the “superhero who’s kind of a dick,” as Fillion describes it. The film was one of the last projects shot on NBC Universal’s New York street set, which burned down earlier this month.

Whedon told Sci-Fi that they’re still trying to figure out how to make their money back on the novel series, but he anticipates it will first be distributed online followed by an iTunes and extras-laden DVD release. The Whedons are already hitting all the major social sites with pages on Facebook and MySpace and posted this trailer on Vimeo yesterday.

This thing has web success written all over. Our only concern is the whole “musical” part, only because we haven’t seen a lot of successful web musicals. But who knows, the “sing-along” portion could lend itself to tons of fan lip-dubs. No official release date has been given yet, but the film’s stars are supposed to be participating in a panel discussion at July’s Comic-Con.

The newteevee world is still ruled by new media stars, according to video distrbutor TubeMogul’s Top 40 list. The list is diverse, but old media types don’t break the the Top 10. New teevee whippersnappers like Next New Networks, Effinfunny.com and MyDamnChannel all scored very high. Moving down the list, old media giants are slowly creeping up, with FOX, CBS, Warner Brothers, HBO and Sony Pictures all grabbing spots. So while old media giants are gaining traction with their massive content libraries in the new media space newer players are still holding their own and building their audiences with fresh, web-specific video.

But you don’t have to be a large content network to make it onto the list. TubeMogul’s list shows that web-savvy personalities can push their personal content out to mass audiences. Chris Pirillo, iJustine, Hayden Black and Nalts all grabbed top spots showing that the mantra of “broadcast yourself” still holds. The fact that an online video buffoon like Nalts can score higher than CBS confirms that the playing field has been significantly leveled.

The presence of non-media companies on the list shows that services like TubeMogul are powerful advertising platforms for a variety of products. Nike and Ford Models both got spots on the Top 40 with their advertising-cum-content strategy that allows their customers to make their products and services part of their online experience.

The faltering music industry is finally starting to embrace this whole internet thing. Billboard.com, EMI and Sub Pop Records all make appearances on the list as music videos are still some of the most popular online content.

The appetite for fresh content is huge and TubeMogul’s list shows that viewers are just as happy to get regular, fresh content from the likes of CBS as iJustine. We’ll keep an eye on this list and see who moves up and down.

What do you get when you stretch an 8-minute video out into an hour-long nature documentary? Mostly, repeated edited clips of those precious 8-minutes diluted by ho-hum back story and speculative experts voicing their opinions.

My father, who hadn’t seen the original “Battle at Kruger” YouTube safari spectacular, joined me tonight to watch the National Geographic Channel’s hour-long, prime-time adaption, “Caught on Safari: Battle at Kruger.” His take: “This is ridiculous! Stop cutting away!”

The documentary promises an “uncut and digitally enhanced” showing of the epic fight to save the baby buffalo from “the original master copy,” but you don’t get to see it until 50 minutes into the oldteevee special. Indeed, the video is hashed and rehashed, punctuated by a healthy dose of network television commercials. In the end, this hour-long documentary undid everything that was satisfying about the original video: the instant gratification, the unadulterated sequence, and the unexpected twists. The purity of the experience is ruined by all the accouterments television thinks necessary.

To National Geographic’s credit, they didn’t shy away from the fact that this was a YouTube viral hit first. This is despite the fact that David Budzinski, the videographer, tried selling the video to a disinterested Nat Geo when he first returned to the states, as the The New York Times reports.

In fact, Nat Geo pursued the YouTube angle to a fault. The show begins with portentous narrator intoning: “YouTube is a way of life for many of us.” But things really dragged when the show delved into the more than 30,000 comments the video has garnered. When television is reduced to reading, verbatim, the prose of internet commenters you know things are bad. To quote my father again: “Why do I care what these other idiots have to say?”

Sure, it was nice to see the video on my large TV in much higher resolution that YouTube’s paltry 320×240, but having it dragged out across a full hour chock-full of commercials sucked the awe and joy out of the battle. I can appreciate a little back story and some expert insight, but this just goes to show that viral video hits have yet to find a comfortable home in living room prime-time.

I just hope “otters holding hands” doesn’t get a three-picture deal from Paramount.

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.

Noujaim said TED organizer Chris Anderson provided the seed funding for what has grown into an event with over 1,300 screenings in over 100 countries. “It’s not one singular vision; it’s a lot of different visions coming together,” Noujaim explained. She also said that sifting through the more than 2,500 films that were submitted has been a significant challenge.

The event is being made widely available, through every medium possible. “We offered it to all the networks for free,” Noujaim said of the television plans. “I was hoping Fox and Al Jazeera would carry it at the same time, but that’s a hope for next year.” Instead, Current’s television station will carry it in the States while it is telecast around the world subtitled in seven different languages.

On the mobile front, video-enabled mobile phones can tune in for the entire 4-hour affair at mobile.pangeaday.org. Additionally, you can upload your own Pangea Day video and pictures and chat live from your mobile at www.ovi.com/pangeaday.

While she’s excited about cutting-edge technology allowing more people to participate, Noujaim, a Harvard-trained visual artist, still sees unanswered questions as online video grows.

“How do you use these cameras to get as much varied content in through these [web sites]? How do you gather people together online to make for a live, communal experience? Me personally, I’d love to see this collect and gather people and then set up real-life screenings together with real people. I do think there is an experience people won’t want to lose of sitting in the dark and watching it together and communicating together face-to-face afterwards.”

NewTeeVee feels the same way. Remember our Pier Screenings?

Pangea Day will present the international community with a variety of questions. What did Tiananmen Square look like from inside the tank? What do Americans singing the Mexican national anthem on the border sound like? Can film unite a world? Find out this Saturday at a screening event near you or catch it online.

Sex sells, especially on the Internet, but The Midwest Teen Sex Show brand of sex is in a class of its own. Where else can you find syphilis portrayed as a chainsaw-wielding murder or learn about the truth behind towel-snapping in the guys’ locker room?

We got to sit down with the show’s host and one of its creative minds when Nikol Hasler left behind the cow pastures and horny teenagers of Wisconsin to visit San Francisco, land of fewer cow pastures but equally horny teenagers. It was a casual chat, with the conversation swinging from her Twittering habits to her childrearing techniques to the fact that she very much wouldn’t want the show to be part of sex ed curriculum. Here are just a few highlights from the intelligently coquettish and inimitably colloquial Ms. Hasler.

Hasler told us that talks are already underway with television networks about moving the Midwest Teen Sex Show to the mainstream, but stressed that the TV execs all seem to understand that the show’s inherent irreverent edginess is key to its success. While the show is ostensibly aimed at teenagers, the audience is primarily of an older (sketchier?) demographic, but Hasler says they are still making sure that everything in the show is teenager appropriate. Hence their “Abstinence” brand of condoms.

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.

The series is written and produced by Sam Slovick, a multimedia artist and journalist who’s written several cover stories on Skid Row for L.A. Weekly. He employs a matter-of-fact narration style to dish out disheartening statistics. When Slovick says flatly, “Los Angeles is the first third-world city in the United States,” it readjusts your image of our urban largess.

The series juxtaposes GOOD’s clean aesthetic with gritty, shaky camcorder footage of Skid Row’s viciousness and vitality. It takes the viewer from a clear graphical representation of the 1.35 million homeless children in America to closeups video of youth on the streets to an animated flowchart of how easy it is to suddenly become “homeless” as defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The series looks like a good project for Kevin Sites, certainly a better follow-up to his “Hot Zone” solo journalism series than his current “People of the Web” trivialities. And so far Slovick holds his own, his gravelly voice narrating while his shaky hand records much of the footage.

His narration and shooting style accentuate the separation between “us,” the presumably not homeless viewers, and the bedraggled and forlorn “them,” the homeless masses on the streets. This schism is perhaps the biggest barrier in understanding homelessness, and the series does not shy away from that.

GOOD Magazine: Skid Row Part 1 Introduction

The series is sponsored by designer Kenneth Cole and MySpace and is consequently mired in MySpace’s horrendous video network. GOOD so far has relied on other video sites to deal with the distribution of their excellently produced content but really needs to invest in tweaking out its own player, allowing it to integrate its videos into the rest of its content. Hopefully, however, MySpace’s involvement will garner this series the many eyeballs it deserves.

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.

Some six months ago, when Anonymous first started making ripples on YouTube (embedded above), the group came off as something more akin to Palahniuk’s subconscious than Thoreau’s conscientious objection. As it evolved, Anonymous began to make rules governing both its operations and its philosophy, in both the digital and real worlds. Using social media, it evolved toward an actionable cause that galvanized thousands.

Things changed for Anonymous when the group, which mainstream media, specifically Fox News, called “hackers on steroids,” decided to use sandwich boards as well as circuit boards. The battle against Scientology’s questionable methods started with a message to the organization of Scientology. Then there was a plea to the individuals within Scientology. But it was Anonymous’ call to action that pushed the group beyond the category mere Internet blowhard.

The last video issued before the day of action (embedded below) lays out 22 rules of protesting that everyone should know before raging against the machine. Anonymous clearly includes members with protesting experience and a commitment to defending freedom of speech through civil disobedience. The video not only connects the virtual and physical, but New Age protest tools to the methods used in the ’50s and ’60s.

The final rule writes web-savvy tactics into the organization’s very fiber. Anonymous knows that history is no longer written by just the victor. In the digital world everyone is a historian, a pundit and a reporter, recording their world online.

Finally, Rule #22: Document the demonstration. Videos and pictures of the event may be used to corroborate your side of the story if law enforcement get involved. Furthermore, posting images and videos of your heroic actions all over the internet is bound to generate win, exhorting other Anonymous to follow your glorious example.

Anonymous succeeded in controlling a huge amount of the coverage of its protest. Scientology has been largely quiet throughout this process, save for issuing a statement dismissing the group as “cyberterrorists” perpetrating “hate crimes” and accusing Anonymous of suppressing free speech.

More tangible than the HD-DVD/Digg upheaval and more immediate than Ron Paul’s fervent online following, Project Chanology lent real civic strength to the Internet. Anonymous set a very specific goal with this protest and met it — in front of hundreds of cameras all over the world. In a way, the group is defining what digital civil disobedience looks like. We’ll see what kind of showing its masked members make during its next “call to action” during the ides of March.

Viral video mashups often play off of jarring juxtapositions. The Brokeback parodies, the animated Soulja Boy remixes, and even the basic webcam lip-synch videos rely on an internal and intrinsic contrast. But these oddball combinations pale in their scope when held up against numerous videos of the same rancorous scene from the film The Downfall, each with a re-subtitled treatment.

Hitler Gets Banned (His Ultimate Downfall)

The film tells the story of Adolf Hitler’s final hours at the end of World War II in a bunker in Berlin. The scene in the film depicts Hitler’s self-deception as he learns that the German war machine has crumbled and Allied forces are quickly closing in; his cinematic tantrum is on par with “Angry German Kid’s” video game-induced fit.

Hitler: Bloodthirsty Dictator, Die-hard Cowboys Fan

The first of these Aryan mashups I could find was posted a little over a year ago and showed Hitler flipping out over his recently stolen car; it received unimpressive video views. But with the help of some Digg love and X-Box fans and critics’ strong opinions on Microsoft’s draconian anti-modding policies, the video of Hitler’s canceled X-Box Live has earned over two million views. More recently, Cracked.com, the online arm of the long-running humor magazine, posted Hitler’s sports fan frenzy following the Cowboys’ devastating loss in NFC championship. The video has garnered over a million views since its posting a mere week ago.

The Downfall of HD-DVD

A key to this strange web trend is the ease of creating your own version. Adding a new set of subtitles is exceedingly easy and allows the author to take the clip in absolutely any direction they want, as you can see from the variety of themes. From modded X-Boxes to the high-def format wars to the Cowboys defeat, Hitler’s wrath is equally vehement.

The videos are a sort of discordant pop culture. Hitler’s hyperbolic furor works because we all know how adamant fanboys and sports fans can be. Seeing history’s leading megalomaniac strangely humanized in a road rage-esque outburst puts the world’s important figures in a humbler light. Conversely, it puts the frivolities of modern day drama and format wars in an appropriately cowing context.

For all of the internet hype J.J. Abrams curried for his latest display of inimitable cinema mystique, Cloverfield remains firmly stuck in twentieth century. The driving voyeuristic shtick of the film — the character-held camera that documents the entire incident — is never developed beyond mere contrivance. Despite its high-tech marketing, the movie itself is decidedly low-tech and consequently out of sync with its audience. The filmmakers do nothing to push the film’s structure beyond its decade-old Blair Witch roots.

Secret Video from Cloverfield – Watch more free videos

The result is that Cloverfield is nothing special. You’ve seen it all before. The novelty is that Mr. Abrams wants you to pay $10.50 to see poorly shot glimpses of a monster too large to be captured on DV tape. Hollywood’s treatment of cinéma-vlog-ité winds up being a hackneyed mode of storytelling that gets in the way of the story and leaves me wondering — did this movie need a theatrical release at all? Could it have instead been released online, available as a mysterious download? This would have made Cloverfield a remarkable piece of twenty-first-century digital filmmaking as opposed to a twentieth-century piece of Hollywood tech-sploitation.

The film presents a extremely analog fight against the monster. Indeed, the starring posse of twenty-something year-old Manhattanites defy their demographic and have nary a smart phone among them. The characters never employ anything beyond a dying cell phone and a fire ax to fight their way through midtown. The most high-tech the film seems to get is the never-ending battery and DV tape in the camcorder that run for nigh on 12 continuous hours. In the world of Cloverfield there seem to be no text messages, no Google maps, and no hyperlinks.

The film had the potential to give the Lonelygirl format a big-budget treatment. What if a Cloverfield website had encouraged fans to post their own video encounters with the monster and share their own Flickr pages documenting the destruction? What if instead of videoed confessionals at a party there were “bon voyages” and “best of lucks!” scrawled on the departing character’s Facebook wall?

Let incidental comments, messages, texts, and pics take care of the character development the film tries cramming into a half dozen flashbacks and several lines of strained dialog. Instead of a disorganized scatter shot of one-off websites, what if the film had worked to create a digital mass media mise-en-scène, allowing viewers to interact, explore, and share an understanding of the Cloverfield world?

Too bad Abrams is too attached to the studio establishment to pull a Radiohead on the movie industry.

Sure, it wouldn’t be worth $10.50, but neither is Cloverfield on the big screen. A feature film should be a unique experiential event. Cloverfield took a digital idea and gave it an analog treatment.

The teenage superstar who brought you the “supermanning” dance sensation of 2007 is back with a new jam. Whether you made your own Crank Dat dance video or thought the infectious beat was migraine-inducing, there is no doubt the Chi-town-born ATL-hailing Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em (copyright issues made him officially change his name from “Soulja Boy”) has become an Internet mega-sensation. His infamous first single, Crank Dat (Soulja Boy), has become the best-selling digital single ever, CNN reports. With over three million ringtones sold, Crank Dat has sat at No. 1 on the ringtone chart for 18 weeks and counting.

The viewcount numbers on YouTube are equally ridiculous. His original music video is the 17th most viewed video ever, with nearly 30 million views, and another 11 million views on the Universal Music Group posting of the same video. He has 14 videos that have accrued over a million views. His viral success extends far beyond his own well-traveled YouTube channel, on which he currently has 126 videos. Over 20 fan-created mashup, crashup, and webcam dance videos have racked up over a million views each. The scope of this video sensation is unlike anything we’ve seen before. I’ve included the upload date and view count with each video. It seems if you just put “Soulja Boy Crank Dat” in the title of your video you’re guaranteed a million extra views.

Soulja Boy Tellem – YAHHH – OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO

Uploaded: Jan. 10, 2008. View Count: 834,950
Note the prominent display of Soulja’s own ringtone.

Soulja Boy Tellem – How to Crank That – INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO!

Uploaded: Aug. 2, 2007. View Count: 25,146,350.
With nearly as many views as the original music video, this instructional video was a brilliant move on Soulja Boy’s part. Allowing his fan base of webcam-dancing teenagers to practice the moves step-by-step has created a dance phenomenon and spurred the upload of hundreds of fan video.

Crank Dat Soulja Boy Spongebob

Uploaded: June 16, 2007. View Count: 23,508,256
There are also recut music videos using Winnie the Pooh, Dora the Explorer, Alvin and the Chipmunks (complete with high-pitched vocals), The Simpsons, Mario, and Superman (of course), all of which have over one million views each.

Soulja Boy CNN News

Uploaded: Jan. 14, 2008. View Count: 153,842.
Ripped from CNN, it’s always entertaining to see old teevee reportage trying to grapple with the novelty of new teevee.

Soulja Boy dance, MIT style

Uploaded: Oct. 3, 2007. View Count: 30,125.
Even nerds need to crank it sometimes. Notice that that is indeed Richard Stallman, software freedom hacktivist, dancing in the middle holding a laptop.

Under a new partnership unveiled today, Kaltura, maker of embeddable collaborative video webware, will bring video to the Wikimedia family of sites. The beta program, which is being dubbed “an open, collaborative video experiment,” will allow users to add and remix rich media via an embeddable player on wiki pages.

Kaltura’s software will be tested on WikiEducator before making its way onto actual Wikipedia pages. Kaltura will release its own front-end and back-end code, as open source and open standards are critical ideas to the test’s success, Kaltura’s CTO Shay David stressed to us. Several demo pages with example Kalturas (yes, it’s also a noun) have already been put up, including this one on recycling.

Following Wikipedia’s original idea of having the world co-edit the most comprehensive encyclopedia, Kaltura will move those textually two-dimensional pages into the video-enhanced age of rich social media. In other words, the wisdom of the masses just got a webcam and everyone gets final cut.

Each Kaltura has an annotated list of contributors and editors and a segmented time line that allows users to see, at a glance, exactly how many cooks have been in the kitchen. You can even go back in the Kaltura’s history and view an older version, allowing you compare Kaltura cuts and follow its evolution.

Kaltura follows Wikipedia’s model for exceedingly simple user interface. To add an asset to a Kaltura, from your computer or the web, simply click “add to this video.” From there you can upload a file or direct Kaltura to a linked asset. You can also log into YouTube or MySpace from inside the widget and upload videos from your existing accounts.

If you want to get in and get your hands dirty, you can click “edit this video,” whereupon a full-sized iMovie-esque interface pops up, complete with time lines and asset lists, as well as separate video, soundtrack and voiceover tracks. A limited but sufficient palette of special effects are available including dissolves, wipes and fades, though it does lack the all-powerful star wipe.

Kaltura has been working on this collaborative video software for several months and it looks better and smoother than the version we tested back in October, a month after the company’s public launch. The key is making it easy to use but productive. For anyone who has used video editing software, regardless of which one, Kaltura’s interface will be very navigable. With this beta, we’ll find out if wiki communities can repeat their productive text-based collaborations in video form.

Every year the world’s best surfers wait with bated breath from December until March to hear about Mavericks. “When the Pacific storms start raging again and the conditions line up just right” some of the best surf conditions imaginable will suddenly materialize and contestants get a phone call and 24 hours to get to Half Moon Bay, California. The call has come in, and the annual Mavericks Surf Contest has been announced for 2008 — and it’s today. The fortuitous Saturday timing of the event will surely bring out a larger-than-usual crowd to the cliffs of Half Moon Bay. But if you’re not able to get your gear in order in time to make it to the event, don’t worry.

If you’re in San Francisco, for $25 you can party it up at AT&T Park and watch the world’s elite shoot the tubes on the giant stadium screen. Or if you’re more of a homebody and don’t want to leave your computer, you can catch the event streamed live on MySpace for free.

Last year we were excited because the contest was scheduled to be streamed live for free on on both CBS Sportsline and the official Mavericks site. However, the swells never materialized during the 2007.

Mavericks Profile — The Mavericks Mystique

The waves at Mavericks, located just north of Half Moon Bay, can routinely top 25 feet and have gotten as high as 50 feet. The spot is so storied multiple books and movies have been made about its tubular swells.

Mavericks Surf Contest — 2006 Highlight Reel

I could listen to surfers talking about surfing all day long. Their casual drawl, fluid sentence construction, and punctuating “dudes” are a surefire cure for winter cabin fever.

This is exactly the type of coverage that Current’s View Created Content (VC2) program was designed for. A cool story hook, some beautiful b-roll, colorful main character and a rockin’ soundtrack make for compelling online video. The surfing film is its own genre and since The Endless Summer it’s been shot by the surfers themselves. Taking it online is the natural next step.

Here is the promo video for the 2006/2007 Mavericks Surf Contest that never happened. They had their media syndication and Ask.com sponsors all in a row but the forces of nature didn’t cooperate.

More surfing videos on SurfingMagazine.com

There is nothing hotter than surfer chicks. Seriously. Also, SurfingMagazine gets some points for a surprisingly decent video selection, complete with embeds, as seen here.

I have seen every single episode of The Office (the American version), yet I have not watched a single second of network NBC in years. I took in the first three seasons of the sardonic comedy via Netflix’s “Watch Now” option, caught the beginning of season four on the NBC site, and then watched the most recent episodes on the much more navigable Hulu. I am the reason the writers are striking. While the networks are telling writers that online content serves as “promotions” for their prime-time shows, increasingly these “promotions” are the shows, as more and more viewers watch exclusively online.

The Office is a particularly good example of the what is going on in this strike as so many of the stars are the writers — even headliner Steve Carell is a WGA member. The show also has a large amount of online content, much of it written by the show’s writers. From Dunder Mifflin’s corporate web site, to the comprehensive show site, to the summer webisodes, the show’s online content is covered in ads, but the writers don’t see a penny of that revenue.

All of that aside, what do we Office fans do now? Well, not to worry, we’ve got some Office-related goodies for you. And in addition to the videos below, there are also the many character/actor online properties, such as Pam/Jenna’s MySpace page, Schrute-Space and Creed Thoughts, all of which the actors have maintained throughout the strike. Please feel free to add your own Dunder Mifflin-related comments.

The Office Is Closed

“Whenever I meet somebody who’s a new viewer of The Office they are overwhelmingly watching it on the Internet; they’re watching it on DVD.” I think this pretty much sums up the problem.

Behind the Scenes of The Office

Nalts covers “The Office Convention” which took place in Scranton, Penn., in late October. Nalts is Kevin Nalty, a self-described level 8.5 fan — which means he “represent[s] no imminent danger but [he is] obsessed.”

Super News: The (Oval) Office

Though I was impressed by how well the Bush Administration fit into the roles in HBO’s Entourage, I think that this take on The Oval Office is dead on. It’s terrifying how much Michael Scott’s rambling, non-specific and often self-defeating language sounds like much of the rhetoric coming out of the White House.

The Scantones — Creep

I first read about this on Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List” in their dead-tree edition. “The Scrantones,” led by Craig Robinson, The Office’s warehouse manager, cover Radiohead’s song Creep.

It’s Getting Hot In Here: Scranton Style

It’s amazing what a fan with all of the episodes of their favorite show, a copy of iMovie, and lots of free time can do. I’m not sure if that’s more or less impressive than the half a million views this clip has gotten.

The Office Re-Cut

No compendium of fan material would be complete without a genre-bending remix of the source material. Here we have the 80 most murderous seconds of the show. Out of context, how homicidal does your workplace seem?