PoliticsTV produced this video for the PDF Conference yesterday, now on YouTube:

The final panel of the day featured the eCampaign directors (or equivalent title) for five candidates in discussion on the role of new media.

Talk centered on the impact of the internet and web 2.0 in particular as a tool to cultivate relationships and build a movement. It is clear that that the internet has changed campaign strategy and operations from the top down.

The Highlights:

Joe Trippi (Edwards ‘08)
On Democratization - “Clearly the big shift is to the bottom. Power is moving to the people which is a good thing in terms of democratizing…I think the thing that’s happening is millions of people…are participating in politics at numbers that have not likely participated before, that’s impacting politics. How are we building the slingshots for that army of Davids out there that wants to do things?…You don’t want to be David you don’t want to be Goliath, you just want to help them get the slingshots. ”

Josh Orton (Obama ‘08)
On the impact of web 2.0 - “It can be scary because it’s all new…and now that everyone has bought into it there’s so much more you can do. The beauty of what we can do with technology is you’ll never supplant meeting people in their homes and in their communities in the end it’s individuals want information and it’s one to many, it may be many to many but it’s information people want.” He discussed building durable relationships, “something that can last beyond the finite length of the campaign.”

Christian Ferry (McKain ‘08)
On Campaign-Generated Video - “Campaigns really are using video and there are unedited and behind the scenes stuff and I think you will see more as the campains are going on.”

Peter Daou (Clinton ‘08)
On Increased Interaction - “Getting feedback and getting input…is critically important and it’s an important part of the campaign and listened to at very high levels, it’s one of the key ways campaigns interact and it’s a great function of the internet.”
On Overall Campaign Strategy - “The net touches on so many more parts of the campaign, so much more ubiquitous with so many new tools. Things have changed dramatically and it’s natural that the role evolves into a larger thing.”

Tom Friendman today expanded on his World is Flat concept with some thoughts on new media activism and the dark side of web 2.0.

Citing the role of Environmental Defense and the NRDC in forcing environmental change in the TXU buyout, Friedman discussed how the advancement of user-generated content is empowering activism while creating a public figure out of everyone.

The ease and low cost of self-distribution have removed the barriers to activism and the cost of getting a message out. So “if it’s not happening it’s ‘cause you’re not doing it”

There is a dark side to constant connectivity as well. In Friedman’s words, “technology can make the far feel very near and make the near feel very far.” We live in a state of “continuous potential distraction”

The ability to easily publish anything makes propaganda and libel simpler to distribute as well, and the potential of the internet to start rumors and spread misinformation is unlimited. One of Friedman’s examples was to google myspace lawsuits and see what comes up.

On an unrelated note MoveOn.org used a panel here a few hours ago to launch a campaign against MySpace censorship.

While not a video-only thought, the unbelievable rate of acquisitions - and staggering valuations - is worth a mention.

This morning’s MSFT acquisition of aQuantive isn’t much of a surprise, but the price tag came out of left field. After losing out on 24/7 to WPP and DoubleClick going to Google for a cool $3.1 bil, the $6 billion price tag for aQuantive nearly gave me a heart attack. After some thought, though, they have a much broader offering than DoubleClick including their Avenue A agency and Razorfish creative shop which have both seen dramatic increases in business over the past couple of years.

Most surprisingly, though, and probably not going to get much attention, is the $50 million investment into ad rep firm Gorilla Nation by private equity firm Great Hills Partners. I’m not sure how they see making that money back, despite Gorilla Nation’s track record of success. As a rep firm, they are working on percentages of other web site’s inventory, most of which aren’t top-tier properties, and aren’t all exclusively repped by the Nation.

Some early notes from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote talk with Tom Friedman:

Schmidt opened by remarking on all the laptops “This looks like a Google meeting because no one is actually looking at the speaker…it’s a statement of how important this technology is”

On Universal search - Result of time research new technology. Going from disparate specialty searches to “ask the right question and get all the right answers”

On Politics and new media - “most people understand politics in a before television way and an after television way… you can image the same thing now occurring with this personalized medium.”

On sensorship - In China “there appears to be something called a great firewall” and if you are on one side you see different things than on the other side. Chinese media controls”
How to respond to censorship by foreign governments? “The answer is painfully” and on a case by case basis.

On Chinese media controls – “By law we had to be part of that…in our case we entered the country legally and in the case where [the Great Firewall] omits results we tell the Chinese citizen that information was omitted.” There are ways to go around the “great firewall” but it hasn’t really happened yet.

On YouTube - “YouTube turns out to be a different phenomena than television…the community is exploding. Video is one of the key technologies for the web. Remember many mobile phones are now videophones. The explosion in content…very much a long tail distribution.” Not only is YouTube different from television but the community makes it better.

On military restrictions - “we would prefer that they not…people are pretty good at determining how they spend their time”

On Privacy - “we’re trying to be more transparent…from a global perspective there are plenty of organizations that are trying to regulate us…using YouTube as much as possible to document ourselves.”

On education - we need to invest more on it, “people who are searching are learning”

Paid attendees asked the questions not the press, Jeff Jarvis asked the first question re: YouTube’s role in political coveage. - Schmidt Discussed YouChoose08, YouTube’s hosting of democratic debate, “I do believe that technology’s likely to have a significant impact on the outcome of the election.”

Interesting, but as Josh Bernoff notes “Tom didn’t push very hard.”

Paul Wolfowitz has finally resigned in the wake of getting his girlfriend a pretty damn good job.

Above: ‘The Bank’ is the most viewed Wolfowitz clip on YouTube.

In other news we will be covering the Personal Democracy Forum on Friday. We expect some interesting things to come out of it.

Funny story about Streaming Media East - Almost everyone had a big screen TV playing video in flash or windows media, but no one was actually streaming anything. Windows media and flash usually look great when played from the hard drive.

There were a ton of CDNs but there really weren’t too many other service providers. Aside from player builders like Maven, the Content Management companies like The Platform and a few others it was a pretty small group of exhibitors.

Notably missing were the rich media advertising agencies. The Search Engine Strategies conference had 3 exhibit halls full of vendors and search is clearly where companies continue to focus most of their online advertising dollars.

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The Future of Broadband conference yesterday had the same essential message shared by everyone in online space - online video is changing everything. Broadband video truly is taxing existing networks.

One of the most interesting moments was a debate among panelists on network neutrality and in particular whether policy controls are in opposition to net neutrality.

Rich Cardone of DSL Forum made the argument that from a market perspective classes of service make sense. Enterprise users will have higher bandwidth requirements and will pay more to know that network service will be uninterrupted.

Susie Kim Riley of Camiant followed up on this by saying that Google has proven this argument by partnering with third party network suppliers to ensure high Quality of Service.

The best argument for network policy controls is that as we move toward increased use of VOIP and communication occurs more frequently over IP networks, priority of access to emergency services is becomes essential.

We aren’t there yet but networks are moving toward smart gateways and routers that will personalize the digital media experience for each user across platforms and standards.

The future is a universal cross-platform personalized media experience allowing users to consume content on any device combined with relevant advertising based on their history.

It’s great when political video goes viral. There is a legitimate value to the argument that some long-form content does better online. James Comey’s testimony (below) is a great example of news content which is not well served by network sound-bites but is widely viewed in its entirety online.

Comey, a former senior Justice Department official revealed what the Washington Post is calling “an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.”

Comey details a late-night rush when he was acting Attorney General to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed to preempt a move by the Bush administration to force an incapacitated Ashcroft to approve a domestic spying program deemed illegal by the justice department.

Also of note is the fact that YouTube seems to have suspended its 10-minute per clip limitation for this video - Something Google seems willing to do for their best users.

Switching gears today and attending Light Reading’s Future of Broadband conference. Gotuit’s CEO was on the early panel. Most of this gets very technical but there has been some interesting talk on net neutrality.

I did steal away for a few hours in the afternoon to see the end of Jarvis et al on the Creating the New Television panel at Streaming Media East. Talk focused on interactivity and the low cost of self-distribution as well as the segmentation of media. Some insights from that:

Wallstrip costs about $2,500 an episode to produce.

It is possible to make a six figure living on self-produced online content.

The great thing about WebTV is that it’s delivering content that TV can’t and offering it more quickly.

Jarvis thinks “p2p is gonna come in and make an incredible difference.”

Ad technology in the form of dynamic insertion and video overlays will continue to make a larger impact.

A streaming media governing body is needed and it is only a matter of time until it’s reality.

GoTuit today launched an online video remix product which is cool not just because it features Akon, but because of how it works.

In a media briefing at Streaming Media East today, Gotuit CEO Mark Pascarella and product manager Patrick Donovan showcased their PowerVideo Suite and Video Mixer, which allows users to “remix” custom mash-ups in a flash-based editing interface.

The core technology allows users to “deep-tag” specific sections of a video with metadata for ease of search and rapid playback of a specific section. Ultimitely the video can be sectioned off into infinite specifically tagged pieces allowing for widespread distribution and ad-targeting about as specific as you can get.

Once a mashup is created, it has its own unique URL and can be embedded, but does not take up any additional space. The player simply calls specific sections of the original video as used in the remix for immediate access.

Gotuit and Universal will be offering additional remix products for Fergie, Gwen Stefani and U2 among others in the coming months. They plan on creating mashup contests to drive users.