The 13th annual Webby Awards call for entries is on. As usual, the Online Film and Video awards will honor the best in online video in a variety of categories, so if you’re feeling “Head of the Class” these days you should enter your work!

NewTeeVee’s popular Pier Screenings are coming to LA on August 28 for a special one-off event celebrating the non-human. I guess that’s how those self-righteous San Francisco types conceptualize LA - non-human, soul-sucking, devoid of emotion ;). Anyhow, it should be a great time, and they’re accepting submissions until August 21 so submit! You can submit a video from pretty much any platform, Revver included. More info on the event, prizes, and submissions here.

We’re a couple weeks shy of the official opening day of summer, but we’re providing a little preview this Thursday night at our Summertime Screening Event. As always, everything is free and open to the public: food, drinks, awesome videos, parking, and we’ll even put the Laker game on for you die-hard fans. Come join us! Details and RSVP on our Eventbrite page over here.

Just a quick heads up to let you know that we’ll be undergoing a three-stage hardware upgrade that will begin in a couple weeks. Depending on your particular use of Revver, this will likely cause some type of outage in your services. During these stages, we’ll be physically moving our servers to a bigger and better datacenter while upgrading our networking infrastructure at the same time. We want you to know that we’re doing our best to minimize the impact of these outages, and hope that ample warning will give you a chance to message out to your own users if needed. Details are as follows:

1) The first outage will occur on June 7th, from 11 am to 6 pm PST. During this time, no videos will play on or off Revver.com, and Revver.com will be be unavailable. We are preparing a service outage message that will appear on the player when someone clicks on a video, so the viewer won’t be left with an endless spiral or a “video not available” message.

2) The second outage will occur on June 12th from 11 pm to 3 am PST. This will affect Revver.com and the Revver API. Anyone depending on the Revver API to get video metadata will be unable to do so at this time. Because of the API outage, Widgets and RSS feeds will also be down. Otherwise, videos posted off Revver.com will play normally.

3) The final outage will occur on June 17th, from 12 pm to 5 pm PST. During this time, Revver’s transcoding and development servers will be offline. Videos will continue to play on and off Revver.com. This outage will not be visible to most users, but transcoding will be down, so videos uploaded during this period will not be processed until the outage is over. We are prepared to work through the transcoding backlog quickly, and will let you know if there are any problems.

We appreciate your patience during these upgrades and look forward to being a better and stronger Revver when we’re finished!

If you have any questions about how this will affect you specifically, don’t hesitate to contact us at support at revver.com.

You may have noticed that we’ve been beefing up social features on Revver.com recently. Offsite publishing tools like our customizable player are still a priority, but we’ve found that people want to hang around Revver.com too. Since we like having you, why not give you more and more to do while you’re here? Our latest addition makes it easier for you to see what other creators you’re interested in are up to.

We’ve broken up what were previously called “contacts” into “friends” and “subscribers.” Anyone who had added you as a contact is now a subscriber, and you are now subscribed to anyone you had added as a contact. Your subscribers see any new videos you upload in the subscriptions tab in their dashboard, and you see new videos from anyone you’ve subscribed to in your own subscriptions tab. This is a great way to round up all of the content that you want to watch when it’s hot off the presses. To subscribe to a Revver user, just click the subscribe button on a video watch page, or on the user’s profile.

If the subscription thing seems a little impersonal, and you’re actually interested in the creator and not just the content, you have the option of adding users as friends. Unlike subscriptions, friends are a two way street. You send someone a friend request, and they accept or ignore it. If they accept your friend request, both of you are alerted through a news feed when the other leaves a comment on a video, changes anything in his/her profile, or uploads a new video. You can also send messages back and forth to friends if you’re ready for that kind of thing. To send a friend request, just click the “add as a friend” button on the user’s profile page.

Everyone is starting off with zero friends, so don’t feel bad about that. If you’re nervous about your first request, Asi promises he’ll accept anyone.

In an effort to keep pace with all the “hottest _____” polls that seem to target women much more frequently than men (sarcastic emphasis mine), TV Week is currently hosting a contest for the Hottest Male Web Host. That’s right, if nerd and stud occupy the same region of your erogenous vocabulary you can go vote for your male internet web host crush. Some familiar faces are there, so go vote — and if Cute With Chris doesn’t advance to the next round you should all be ashamed of yourselves.

Thanks to everyone that came out last night for our comedy screening event - it was totally the best one yet! Thanks again to Elders of the Dark Tower (of Xoron) for their rad live performance (video coming soon) and to Ask A Chola for hosting (video also coming soon). Several people at the show suggested that a program of the videos we screened would have been welcome, and since we didn’t have the foresight to make one up before the event we’re doing one now. Here’s what we played:

Sunshine Horseley - Hippie Doctor, M.D. by Jason Berlin
_________________

Workbot by Rangoon Online
_________________

Parody of “Welcome To My House” by Deven Green
_________________

One Picture Everyday by Olde English
_________________

Clitter by Those Aren’t Muskets
_________________

Is My Roommate Gay? (It’s Not a Big Deal I Just Want to Know) by Good Neighbor
_________________

Crazy Corn Spitting by The Apple Sisters
_________________

Chola, The Founding Fathers, and the Constitution by Ask A Chola
_________________

Afternoon Delight by Marabou
_________________

A Night at the Improv by Elders of the Dark Tower (of Xoron)
_________________

Touchtone Genius by Sunsnzeezer
_________________

Looking forward to the next one already!!

Just a reminder that the Revver Screening Series returns this Thursday, April 3. The event is from 7-10pm at the Goethe Institut here in LA (near LACMA), and will feature free food, booze, a screening of rad videos, and a live performance by LA sketch comedy group Elders of the Dark Tower of Xoron.

Come one come all! RSVP and info here.

In association with our partnership with LiveUniverse, several Revver creators recently began publishing live shows on LiveVideo, LiveUniverse’s signature live broadcast portal. GameZombie, Black Nerd Comedy and Pansy Warrior Princess are all now doing live shows. Check out Black Nerd Comedy’s show tonight at 5 pm PST right here. He’ll be doing another show Thursday March 20 at 10 pm PST after Lost to talk about the show.

Want your own live show? Head over to LiveVideo.com and check it out.

The Revver Screening Series returns in April with our very first event featuring a live performance to celebrate our partnership with LiveVideo.com. Come join us for our usual program of rad videos, talented creators, and consumables (food, booze), and revel in the enhanced pleasure of a real, original, live performance by one of our favorite creators. Who's it gonna be? You tell us - check out the videos down below and vote for the creator you'd like to see perform.

The event will be held on Thursday, April 3 from 7:00-9:30 pm at the Goethe Institut in Los Angeles. The theme for this event is comedy, so after the performance we'll be showing some of our favorite comedy videos from the Revver library. If you have a video you'd like us to consider, send it our way by Monday, March 24. Space for the event is limited so if you plan to attend, please RSVP on our Eventbrite page.

OK, now for the good stuff. Here are the 5 contenders, vote at the bottom for the one you’d like to see perform live at the event:

__________

Good Neighbor - Is My Roomate Gay? (it’s not a big deal, I just want to know):

__________

The Vacationeers - Google Maps:

__________

Elders of the Dark Tower - Project Runway vs. Werewolf:

__________

Chad, Matt and Rob - Alien Rommate Prank Goes Bad:

__________

Fries on the Side - The Magic Lamp:

__________

Voting closes at noon on Friday, March 21. Thanks for voting!