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All the excitement talent and capital flowing into online video related companies can make it tough to put things in perspective. Following a week of major news and industry events it is a good time to take stock of where we really are now, and where we’re headed.

At PDF2007, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry issued a call to 2008 presidential candidates to endorse six “very specific technology policy goals.” These also work as a great framework for considering the industry issues that exist at this early stage in new media.

As we…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…