NBCOlympics, Yahoo, and the usual sporting site suspects aren’t the only beaches on which the Olympics traffic wave hit this month. Rodale’s RunnersWorld.com reports a personal best last week of 5.14 million page views, with Monday running the fastest leg at 885,000 views. The site wisely leveraged its expertise during the second week of the games, which featured track and field events. A blog straight from Beijing gave the site a personal feel, but the RW microsite is a good example of narrowcasting. While the rest of the sports sites struggled to manage masses of sports and stories, this destination gathered the key events into a nice menu of clear clickstreams. There were daily recaps for drive-by viewing and home grown video that offered a different take on the games than the endless streams NBC gushed online. An “Olympics Photos” newsletter and online slideshow helped spike traffic as well. A content partnership with NBCOlympics.com surely helped, but RunnersWorld coverage did stand out for its concision and depth.

Anyone who has been with me oh these many years of digital voyeurism know how many made-for-the-Web video series we have seen. I go back to the days when the felons of TheDen were sucking up VC money left and right in the hopes of bringing TV-style content to a Web with precious few broadband customers. Learning that lesson, the wags at PseudoTV turned to lo-res Webcams transmitting public-access-level programming of anyone they could pull off the street. Then the mode turned to animated series. Everyone wanted to leverage cheap Flash production itno the next South Park. And so companies like Icebox, Atom Films, and Shockwave tried launching series after series of offbeat curios. Anuone remember Hard Drinkin’s Lincoln? Angry Kid? Stainboy?

I didn’t think so. And so as online video takes off I admit some skepticism about the likes of Seth “Family Guy” MacFarlane and Joss “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Whedon brining their talents to Webisodics. We have been here before. After ding the mildly funny “Landlord” sketch for his Funny or Die site, Will Ferrell hasn’t delivered much of a second act. And wasn’t it Tim Burton who tried to bring repectable creativity to the digital video format years ago, too?

So I was surprised, nay, impressed by two Webisodics I screened this weekend. The ongoing “N” series from CBS Mobile and Simon and Schuster is an animated graphic novel that promoted the upcoming release of Stephen King’s short story of the same name. Using what we used to call limited animation, the creators have add music and minimal movement to static graphic novel drawings. The 20 very short one-minute episodes are very effective in drawing the viewer in to a story about a psychiatrist who seems to catch his patient’s obsessive-compulsive mania. The relentless melodrama that each micro-episode hits frankly woks very well, both on the Web and even on the phone. You can watch a package of five episodes or one at a time.

The other series that shows great promise for the format is Joss Whedan’s comic Dr. Horrible’s Singa-along Blog, featuring Neil Patrick Harris as a hapless, wannabe super-villain. The production values (including many musical numbers) sets a new high standard for the form, and the three-episode structure makes for a compelling narrative arc.

Perhaps more astonishing is that both series are using the fee-based model via iTunes. In the case of Whedan’s Dr. Horrible, the series is among the most popular in the iTunes library.
If publishers are wondering if the Web can support tried and true narrative genres like suspense and comedy, I strongly suggest they check out these series. They made these crusty cynic a little more hopeful that the Web medium could create genuine entertainment.

Even as Sporting News changes its print publishing schedule to bi-weekly, the venerable brand is revamping its Web strategy with a digital Sporting News Today daily issue.  Subscribers get an email link early in the morning to a digital magazine online (powered by Texterity). Staci Kramer of paidContent.org reports the full story here. Somewhere between the print pub and the enormous SportingNews.com site, this digital daily provides encapsulated and concentrated doses of sporting news in a format that is just more digestible than a site. I have to say, as someone who has been critical of the digital magazine format, this is a promising use of the platform. Unlike familiar old rationales for digital magazines — that they get us beyond the distribution and interactivity limitations of print — this model actually calls attention to the limitations of the Web as a content platform. The real-time and bottomless nature of Web sites makes them tough places to get an overview of a day’s content. In the rapid-fire news cycles of the Internet, this morning’s story is already off the the home page by noon. The comventions of a print layout remain the most browsable form of content delivery, and the page limitations enforce a kind of brevity that the Web seems to have forgotten. Sporting News is making good use of lush imagery, eye-catching headlines, and typefaces in ways that remind us why print still works so well. According to the paidContent report, over 70,000 subscribers have signed on already, more than double last week’s start point. The company is looking to reacha  200,000 sub threshhold before carting it around to advertisers. I think this is an interesting model to watch.

Now here is a tale of two standards. Last week, thin-skinned politicos were wringing hands and every last drop of TV commentary they could from the New Yorker Obama family cartoon cover. This week, the famous JibJab online satire site releases its Election 2008 Flash video “Time for Some Campaignin’” and I dare say no one will bat an eye. Jay Leno may run it on The Tonight Show and cable may pick it up for a second.  Following on their very successful videos in the last election, JibJab goes for the jugular, giving John McCain a heart attack in the middle of the song. Obama is in ballet tights prancing through the forest and riding a rainbow unicorn. Even a pants-less Bill Clinton makes a cameo and a cigar reference.

Now to be sure, I am one of those who felt The New Yorker cartoon was a misfire, not because it was too biting but because it just wasn’t very good satire. It was so broad and over the top that it failed to make an effective point. JibJab videos are by their very nature broad, shallow and obvious, but somehow funny nevertheless. Sometimes silly works better than smart.

All the recent changes at WSJ.com seem to get attributed to Rupert Murdoch’s dubious influence, except this one. Wall Street Journal Online launches a new section devoted to women in business, Journal Women. One of the featured section in this new page “The Juggle,” says it all. The content discusses both tales of successful businesswomen as well as the everyday challenges of balancing work, family, health, etc. The key writer for the site, Carol Hymowitz starts a new column, “Above the Glass” about women and business leadership, while other regular columnists will cover life and family. According to the Journal, this is an extension into “life franchises” and an attempt to provide women’s content that is not all celebrity and fashion. WSJ says (like everyone else) that it is cultivating a “community,” but user-generated content seems fairly absent on the front page, although the Juggle blog is generating considerable user commentary. We would like to see more of that float to the top, however.

We guess that the “Ultimate Prom” probably would have a recording artist like Ashanti headline the affair. That is how the months-long MyPromStyle.com will culminate at the Grand Hyatt this Friday May 30. Hearst Magazines, in partnership with Universal Motown Records and the St. Francis Preparatory School, is hosting the “Ultimate Prom” with Ashanti, JoJo and others performing for the graduating seniors. The Hearst prom planning site MyPromStyle.com has been running prom tips and ongoing videos about this big prom night. It is a novel marriage of sponsors and content that drill directly into the real life experiences of Hearst’s teen girl audiences for CosmoGirl.com, Seventeen.com and Teenmag.com. Like all anxious parents we all hope to see videos from the party itself at the site. Don’t forget us now. And no drinking! The cameras are rolling.