(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)

In college, I majored in philosophy before dropping out. What I know about politics, I’ve learned on the campaign trail, and what I know about filmmaking, I learned from watching Siskel and Ebert as they talked about which way they would point there thumbs.

However, I’ve now been blogging for several years, which gives me a right, if not a responsibility to opine on any subject that strikes my fancy, and so today I want to talk about online political videos.

At the Personal Democracy Forum conference this year, one of the liveliest and most interesting panels was “Is Online Video More Powerful Than TV Ads?” I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The Nedheads group on YouTube has done a great job of gathering videos in support of Ned Lamont, whose campaign I’m currently working for. From this interest, I’ve ended up as a convener of the Media Giraffe Project’s Citizen Filmmaking Track which will be at University of Massachusetts, Amherst on July 29th.

What makes for good online political videos? This is perhaps too general a question, since there are really many different types of online political videos, but it seems as if there are some key ingredients. Like any other medium, they need to get the message across, ideally both directly and indirectly. More importantly, they need to have the sort of appeal that causes people to spread the word virally.

Lets look at some of the different types on online political videos. First, there are the clips. Whenever Ned appears on TV, his supporters fire up their Tivo’s record the clip and put it online. These clips tend to be around three minutes long, but vary from thirty seconds to ten minutes. They get a small viewership. There isn’t a lot to be said about them. They merely capture what is going on in the mainstream media.

There are videos of speeches at various events. These clips are typically around seven minutes long, again varying from thirty seconds to ten minutes. Often the speech is longer, and is uploaded as several segments to get around various space limitations. Personally, I think these are the most valuable in terms of information. However, they are not typically presented in a way that attracts a wide range of people and they get viewed less frequently.

There is the standard political collateral. There are the thirty-second TV ads that get put up online. These get a fair amount of views. Lamont’s advertisements are cute or funny, depending on your perspective and get a lot of views. Lieberman’s advertisements are also placed online for criticism. You are probably in trouble if your opponents are placing your ads online and this is what is happening to Lieberman. There are also the “Get to know the candidate” pieces that get put online. Often, these are made for DVDs which get distributed offline, but the DVD gets copied online and viewed that way as well.

The DVD based biographic videos get a fairly good viewership. Yesterday, Chris Murphy, who is running for Congress in the Fifth Congressional District in Connecticut, released this online video. It was released initially on YouTube and will be available from their website later today. As is typical of campaign produced biographical pieces, it isn’t as funny and doesn’t have the viral appeal of other online videos, but it is noteworthy that it seems to have been produced for the web, as opposed to produced for a different media and copied online. There have been a couple speeches of Chris Murphy put up online and it will be interesting to see if he starts getting more online video coverage.

Joe Courtney, who is running in the Second Congressional District, has two videos online. The first is a long clip of his acceptance speech at his convention. It is long and hasn’t really spread virally. The second is clips from a rally with veterans. While it says, “Paid for by Courtney for Congress”, it has a wonderful homemade feel to it, including shots where an assistant is holding up a small mike for the veterans to speak into. It has a small viewership as well.

Yet one of areas I’m most interested in is the home made political advertisements. A great example is a mashup of the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington trailer to become Mr. Lamont Goes to Washington.

This is the area where there is the most room to experiment and where the language of online political videos is likely to see the most evolution.

It will be great to see the role online videos play in the coming election cycles, especially those videos coming from the edges. With that, I would love to hear what others are seeing for noteworthy online political videos.