In what is probably my last post on the McCain girls (see here and here and here), I present some closure on the mystery surrounding the creators.

So yes, I did go to elementary school with the long-haired brunette in the video.

And the comedy site 23/6 (owned by IAC) was the producer of the content, as outed by the NY Times today.

Case closed.

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Earlier, I discussed the campaign to get Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up played at Shea Stadium.

Well, it happened. The song got over five million votes.

I caught it on my mobile phone at the game. The fan reaction was pretty harsh. Watch it here:

Here’s what it looked like on TV:

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So YouTube launched their original series Living Legends, featuring an introduction from The Rolling Stones (as I was the first to announce here).

So what do I think?

First of all, the art direction on this thing is just not good. If YouTube wants to be a player in the original content space, they are going to have to choose some good fonts and title treatments, and start making these channel pages a whole lot better looking. Ironically, this is something that MySpace is actually doing right. Check out BBC WOrldwide’s channel on MySpaceTV as an example of sub-channeling content and integration of community elements.

Secondly, I’m a huge Stones fan, and it just pains me to see Mick Jagger so obviously reading the simplest of lines from cue cards.

Thirdly, when I click on the ‘Ask a Question’ button, it just opens up a new tab in my browser and reloads the page.

Maybe it’s just me, but if you land the Rolling Stones (even in an obvious shill for their new movie), do it right.

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My sources tell me that this weekend we will see a premiere of a follow-up to the now legendary ‘It’s Raining McCain” video (see BoingBoing’s coverage here).

Check back here for the next release…

I told you I had someone on the inside.

In case you can’t remember the original, here it is:

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Nothing is important until it gets the South Park treatment.

South Park knows this all too well after billions of un-monetized views of their content online. Recently, that changed with the launch of the new SouthParkStudios.com, home of shareable, linkable, and most importantly, embeddable South Park content. What’s also on display — but not embeddable — includes full episodes.

One of the best things about the site though, is the intelligence behind making individual clips of the episodes available. That’s often what people want to share. They may consume full episodes on their own time, but they want to share only portions of it with others.

Here’s an example, featuring many of your favorite ‘viral video’ stars:

And here’s the FULL EPISODE.

Trey & Matt (and of course, the brilliant minds at Comedy Central [full disclosure: clients, but we were not involved with this initiative]) built a destination that didn’t just give them a reason to sue YouTube, but a way to do it better than YouTube, and custom-built for their content. And in a way that allows them to make money showing the highest-quality content, immediately after airing on TV. Consumers will get used to going there first for the content.

That doesn’t weaken YouTube, but it goes to show you that it’s a phenomenon that’s not impossible to recreate yourself if you’re the rights-holder on great content. The easy part is the technology. The tough part is doing enough to make your site a better centralized distribution point and user experience then the alternatives.

There’s not many doing it as well as SouthParkStudios.com. Take note.

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But it’s cool There’s enough rickrolling to go around.

Read how it all went down on NewTeeVee here.

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YouTube (as I first broke the news on weeks ago) has officially launched their tools to analyze video views, subscriptions, etc. It’s missing a bunch of things that will make it more useful such as referrals, but apparently those are coming.

Check out NewTeeVee’s coverage here.

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Watch this and you’ll understand. It’s like watching a car crash, or the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview. You want to turn away, but you can’t. And once you see it, you’ll wish you could unsee it. But you can’t. So you just watch it over and over again.

And I swear to you, I think I went to grade school with the girl in the black outfit. I’m not kidding. Jamie, is that you?

(Via Boing Boing.)

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Is it me, or does this trailer by Rockstar Games for Grand Theft Auto IV go too far in its sarcastic portrayal of police officers?

Maybe its that I’m an NYC native. Maybe it’s that I was here on Sept. 11. Maybe I saw what true heroes are made of.

I normally have a thick skin and can laugh at just about anything. But put it in the context of trying to sell me something, and I’m not sure it can work.

If people start speaking up about this, I could see them not necessarily being represented as Jack Thompson-supporting loonies.

Rockstar, I’m usualy with you. But I don’t think I am on this one.

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Remember my ’scoop’ about YouTube making recommendations based upon previous viewing habits?

Here’s some of the fruit of their labor:

You can check out yours by logging into YouTube and visiting: http://www.youtube.com/iyt.

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