She’s the insanely successful, Kids Choice Award winning singing/acting daughter of famed mullet-rocking one-hit wonder Billy Ray Cyrus. Her Hannah Montana 3D concert film is almost solely responsible for a 3 percent increase at the overall box office for 2008 thus far. And, of course, she has a YouTube channel.

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Over the past couple of months, Ryan Adams –– yes, THAT Ryan Adams –– has taken the Internet by storm. Adams’ early efforts at producing internet video earned him the predictable scorn from the predictable sources, and in February the sensitive auteur closed his YouTube account. But then, sometime in early March, Ryan Adams discovered Tumblr. His page, titled DR Adams Films and subtitled “TOTALLY BORED the Musical,” seems to have been initially intended as a showcase for Adams’ videos, which he’s now posting on Vimeo.

Don’t Comb The Leprechaun from Ryan Adams on Vimeo.

Though he’s been feverishly micro- (and sometimes macro-) blogging nearly day for the past two weeks, he’s deleted at least as many Tumblr posts as he’s left up, and in a remarkable, only-on-Tumblr phenomena, the archiving of much of Adams’ most interesting drivel has been left to the reblogging of his many Tumblr followers. So far, Adams’ video production has been the most stable aspect of his renewed online presence: though there may have been clips uploaded to Vimeo that have since been taken down that I’m not aware of, as of this writing, Adams has posted four Vimeo videos in the past four days and has shown no sign of either slowing down or deleting the existing clips in regret.

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On Friday night, YouTube user FFABT (it stands for Foundation for a Better Tomorrow, which doesn’t appear to be any kind of organized body on record) uploaded a clip to the site called Jack and Hill. It strings together scenes from films starring on-the-record Hillary Clinton supporter Jack Nicholson, with titles that reflect the Clinton campaign’s typical “experience” -obsessed fear and loathing.

The Huffington Post apparently originally credited the Clinton campaign with producing/uploading the clip, although they’ve now obliterated that reference from their story, while the New York Times’ Caucus blog, which sniped that the clip had only been viewed 518 times as of yesterday afternoon, expressed doubts that Hillary had her hand in it. Then this morning –– at which point the YouTube clip was well on its way to its (at last check) current count of 1,147,991 views –– The Politico revealed that it was not the handiwork of the Clinton campaign, but that of American Beauty producer Bruce Cohen and writer John Krokidas. For $300. And yes, the Nicholson endorsement within is not only real, but was taped with this clip in mind.

OK, so it’s a professional clip, made for an amateur budget. But is it any good? And does it actually accomplish the goal of making Hillary Clinton look good?

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Coming on the heels of a full week of hand-wringing over who Lorne Michaels would pick to play Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live (and the debate was not just confined to the web –– I overheard two hipsters arguing about candidates for “Fauxbama” in a Brooklyn bar the other night), it’s perhaps not much of a surprise that Fred Armisen’s interpretation of the presidential candidate was something of a disappointment. Sure, in tasteful blackface, he looked like Barack Obama, but something about the vocal impression seemed really, really off.

I think the best Obama impression I’ve seen so far comes from Freddy Lockhart, who has taken on the character several times for his SuperDeluxe series, Freddy Lockhart’s Mixed Media. Self-described as “the ultimate mash-up of sketch comedy,” the show grafts a far-reaching, culture-jamming aesthetic onto well-worn subjects for YouTube parody. One recurring sketch has a frat boy auditioning to replace John Brockman as the anthropomorphized PC in a new run of Apple ads taunting his hipster audition partner for being a “fag”; another imagines George W. Bush’s voice coming out of Ralph Wiggum’s mouth.

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Since mid-December, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have produced and starred in three full ten-minute episodes of Nirvana The Band The Show. Something like Clark and Michael for cabaret nerds, the verite-style sitcom follows Johnson and McCarrol as they try to book a show for their hyperactive two-man act, Nirvana The Band.

Nirvana The Band has nothing to do with Nirvana — we don’t actually ever hear a full song, but their act seems to consist of McCarrol playing the piano (quite well, actually) while Johnson improvises elaborate dances and self-referential spoken word — the joke is that the characters of Matt and Jay are apparently unaware that the name “Nirvana” has already been taken.

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In his post on last week’s launch of new video startup Independent Comedy Network, Chris Albrecht expressed doubts as to whether there’s room for another site built around funny video, especially in a market where even star-studded offerings on sites like FunnyOrDie and SuperDeluxe regularly go unnoticed. Having watched the first episodes of each of ICN’s initial five offerings, I’m not crazy about a lot of it, but there’s so far one show which seems to make the whole enterprise worthwhile. 2/8 Life, a spoof of the much-discussed quarterlife, is so smart and funny that it could easily render the target of its satire obsolete.

In a clear reference to My So-Called Life, creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s much-beloved 90s TV show,2/8 Life’s four main characters are named Angela, Brian, Rayanne and Jordan. This is maybe more of a substantial inside wink than it first appears to be. quarterlife often plays as though there’s been an attempt to show Angela Chase and friends “all growned up,” although as I noted in my review, it rarely strives for MSCL’s multiple levels of address. Angela is our precocious video-blogger, a self-possessed but barely self-aware smirker who insists that her video diary is about “making a difference.” Brian is the “best friend” who loves her, Rayanne is the slutty Craig’s List-sourced actress roommate, and Jordan is a moody musician — just like Jordan Catalano, but the young Jared Leto’s brown-eyed paragon of cool is swapped out for a chubby dude who is apparently really into that apotheosis of self-indulgent faux-bohemia, Rent.

2/8 works on a couple of levels. It’s a dead-on parody of the ways in which quarterlife seems to miss the point about contemporary youth culture –– particularly Internet culture –– but it also offers a corrective to quarterlife’s lack of self-criticality. Casual racism, economic Peter Pan syndrome, romantic solipsism –– it’s all there. Where quarterlife seems to aim only to mirror the lives of the young white people that it hopes to appeal to (which is why even the show’s minor gaps in realism are generally so infuriating), 2/8 starts by mirroring quarterlife, and goes on to intelligently skewer the selfish, hypocritical real-life types that quarterlife glorifies without critique.

Last weekend, filmmaker and digital DIY evangelist Arin Crumley went to a party in Brooklyn, where his coat, wallet, passport, bike and video recorder were stolen. Arin has built a brand around finding innovative ways to broadcast his personal issues and private frustrations directly to his audience, so it’s no surprise that, as a step towards recovering burgled items, he made a video.

But it was something of a surprise that the video –– a monologue entitled Social Checks & Balance in the Digital Karma Information Age, in which Crumley manages to talk about party etiquette, metaphysics, Colonialism and communism before essentially warning the perpetrator that s/he can either come forward, no questions asked, or else be tracked down via digital manhunt –– spawned both a spoof video and an exceedingly creepy confession, and became grist for Gawker and YouTube’s hungry commenters.

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Spread out across four episodes on YouTube, Indie vs. Studio is a film-industry spoof of the Mac vs. PC Apple campaign that ultimately acts a rallying cry to encourage independent media producers to take advantage of the WGA strike to figure out new ways to work outside the system. But it takes a circuitous path towards that destination.

We know how these things work: Indie is supposed to be inherently cooler than Studio, just as Mac is supposed to be inherently cooler than PC. But the initial dynamic between the two characters in Indie vs. Studio is very different than its inspiration. Mac, as played by Justin Long, is totally unflappable, coolly confident that even if PC doesn’t come around right away, Mac is ultimately the “correct” path. But in the first two Indie vs. Studio segments, Indie gets flustered incredibly easily, eventually storming off in a huff at Studio’s cheery revelation that he’s looking to cast Dane Cook as Ricky Ricardo in a big-screen remake of I Love Lucy. Meanwhile, his own pet projects sound kind of drippy and humorless.

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The Obama Girl videos are not actually funny. They’re not actually sexy. They don’t actually have any kind of message and they don’t perform any kind of practical analysis. And in their very evasion of any kind of substance, they’re totally genius.

The latest Obama Girl video, Obama Girl Returns For Iowa!, was released on Jan. 2. The Girl makes her return via a faux movie trailer, an election-minded spoof of Rocky Balboa that positions the Girl in a new light: she’s not just a writher, she’s a fighter.

The Obama Girl videos have never had anything of substance to say about Barack Obama’s candidacy or campaign, but unlike the previous clips, Obama Girl Returns amounts to more than just the (admittedly powerful) theme that the desires of attractive women make the world go around. This time, Obama himself is pushed way to the periphery, to make room for an even more powerful theme: the catfight. It’s no longer about Obama vs. Hillary; it’s about Obama Girl using sex and celebrity to clear the path for her man.

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