Oddly enough our first multimedia experiment comes as my tenure at the Collegian ended. It’s a fairly short video, but its already gotten a few good reviews

Last week several politicians announced their intention to run for the presidency in 2008. Besides talking about their hopes for the future and trying to rally momentum for an election almost two years away, the announcements had something else in common.

None of them did it through a press conference, a Sunday morning talk show or even Jon Stewart’s chair. Instead they all chose to make their announcements directly to their supporters through online videos.

The medium of the Mentos and Diet Coke video has finally come of age. Campaigning on the Internet is no longer a novelty, it’s a standard that every campaign is rushing to embrace.

It started last month when John Edwards announced his presidential intentions in a series of videos and Webcasts events.

Among his guests was tech blogger Robert Scoble, who interviewed Edwards for his podcast.

Edwards has a live video discussion scheduled during this week’s State of the Union.

Now his opponents are trying to keep up and outdo each other.

Hillary Clinton has announced she will host a series of live video chats on her Web site.

Barrack Obama reportedly struck a deal with video start-up Brightcove to create his own “channel” of content on the service.

Even Sam Brownback, who is running his campaign on traditional values, embraced online video for his announcement.

The video-frenzy is part of a larger trend of politicians embracing social media tools like blogs, wikis and podcasts.

There’s a lot of potential for both sides in this new arena. Voters should get to interact directly with the candidates. Politicians will be able to transmit their messages directly, rather than go through the gatekeepers of traditional media.

There is a dark side to all this, though.

Video often makes one-sided messages appears as two-way conversations. In theory, a candidate could deliver his message entirely through videos, without ever having to answer a question from reporters.

Howard Dean garnered excitement when he introduced politics to blogs in the last election.

Four years later not much has changed. Generally it’s only the staffers who blog to rally the base. Candidates themselves do not often blog to reach out to voters.

Candidates seem more inclined to do videos, however, because impromptu speeches and meet-and-greets in front of the camera come naturally. The Internet has created opportunities for new levels of openness in all facets of society.

Hopefully politicians will use these new options wisely to enhance the dialogue between voters and candidates.

We don’t have to just hope though. Social media is available for anyone and everyone to use.

So if you’re not satisfied with a politician, use the Internet to demand more of them.

Anyway I have been pretty interested in the ways they are sharing the experience with the world online. They have a webcast running throughout the event, with shout-outs from participants and video of all the festivities. They’re playing it on one of the local access channels here and I have been tuned in all day (Yet another blow to NBC’s Olympic coverage). They are also running a blog with regular posts from Rec Hall. I am kind of annoyed by that, because I wanted to do a Thon blog on the Collegian site. Maybe next year. In any case, check out their coverage and if you can donate, because its a nice cause. And check out the Collegian’s site Monday for their coverage – I’ll be helping produce that on the website.

Update: The Thon webcast was watched by 25,000 viewers in 30 countries over the weekend, and 1/3 of those viewers donated money online. This turned out to be a major part of helping them beat last year’s record.

We’re not knocked out by iPod so far… How many will want to pay $1.99 on Monday morning if they missed “Desperate Housewives” the night before? What’s been announced so far with iPod and Disney and NBC is very small-time at the moment… There are so many things you can do, particularly in other parts of the world, where mobile-telephone service is a lot more developed. We’re downloading minute segments-original “mobisodes”-of the Fox hit “24″… It’ll be a pretty serious piece of revenue for us someday, probably. We’ll be into all these things, some quite original and some of what others are doing.

I wouldn’t mind if Murdoch said they didn’t want to lock their customers into the Apple format or that they think quality of iTunes video was sufficient. I would almost accept the argument that you didn’t trust DRM as a way of protecting your content. But to say that they know what we want better than we do, that’s just stupid. Then to say the “mobisodes” are better, is ridiculous. How can 1 minute of Jack Bauer (actually, I doubt the 24 mobisode even has Kiefer) be better than an hour?

What really bothers me about all this is the presumption that content-owners know their customers better than the customers know themselves. Apple’s model has become very successful and has actually helped shows gain a larger audience (see The Office). I wonder what would happen if Murdoch would have let people could have test Arrested Development out for $1.99 an episode?

(On an aside, last night’s “finale” of Arrested Development was spectacular. Perhaps another network would be good enough to continue it. If that doesn’t happen, it was great while it lasted and they went out with a bang.)

Last month Viacom’s MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon made news by adding a number of series to the iTunes Music Store. What hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is the fact that MTV and Comedy Central already have a lot of video content online for free. MTV Overdrive and Comedy Central Motherload services are pretty intriguing additions since they let you quickly access a wealth of content from their respective networks. They even have Windows Media Center add-ons which are pretty popular. I have found these services to be neat though they require more bandwidth than I really have at this point, but the amount of content is impressive. And MTV overcame an obstacle by putting together a nice plug-in to help it run smoothly on Firefox, in addition to IE.

User-driven media is quickly becoming the darling of the Internet, and video is no exception. iFilm used to seem cool, but YouTube is a much better source for amusing clips these days. Anyone (including me) can upload video clips to the site for worldwide consumption. Its range includes last night’s SNL skit to commercials to lonely teenagers lip-syncing pop songs. Google Video tries to do similar things, though it straddles the line between being an open marketplace and protecting content owner rights. A lot of video blogs are sprouting up on iTunes’ directory and others, including my favorite: Rocketboom. As you can see, free on demand video content is all around us and only growing. Tomorrow I’ll complain about the companies that aren’t embracing it.