We interviewed Phil de Vellis today for the MyDD Blog Talk Radio show (which you can listen to live at 7pm). Below are some thoughts that spun off from that conversation.

The past few weeks have been consumed with discussions about the now infamous Obama 1984 YouTube ad created by ParkRidge47, aka Phil de Vellis.

As I've detailed before, the video gained traction within the progressive blogosphere, eventually getting enough views so that the SF Chronicle deemed it worthy of a story, which in turn triggered the media firestorm that drove more people to watch the ad. It was a fascinating snowballing effect that took had to grow big enough in the progressive sphere before it jumped to the mainstream media.

For the media and bloggers, it the anonymous identity of ParkRidge47, added the tantalizing element of mystery (and possibly scandal) to the story. In addition, the groundwork for this had been laid for sometime in the media with the growth of "this YouTube thing" and were primed for an example that wasn't macaca. But because Phil was revealed to be an employee of a technology vendor for the Obama campaign, many have focused on the gotcha aspects of the story and I think an important element of the story has been lost.

The problem is now that for many in the media, in campaigns, and the public - this was their first exposure to a viral user-created political video - and they may now judge all videos that follow against the high bar it sets.

The attention paid to the success of the video fits into our framework of judging things things based on popularity. But the Long Tail theory shows that on the internet, we don't have to judge things by this standard of popularity, that just as much influence can come from a hundred videos viewed a thousand times than as one viewed as million times.

The problem for all of us is that the internet is so vast and every individual's interactions with it so diverse, that there's no one way to truly get a handle on everything that's going on out there. So we focus on videos with the most views, because its the easiest way for us to understand it. But the true story of online video, of online influence, can't be found by clicking refresh on YouTube's most popular videos. It's in the hundreds, the thousands, of videos with smaller views that have a greater aggregate influence.

In his piece on the Huffington Post, Phil wrote:

"This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."

And he's spot on.

Many will hope to recreate Phil's success, and inevitably there will be those as or more successful. And they'll all be judged against the high standard set by his video.

But the next big story will not be the video that goes viral and gets 7 million views. It'll be the 10 videos that get 10,000 views each. And then means a lot more time spent on YouTube for all of us.