New media
Ourmedia.org serves as a:
- Free, not-for-profit effort to create a global home for grassroots media
- Resource to bring homemade video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works into an easy-to-access network
- Learning toolkit on how to create rich and compelling works
- Community space
- Archive so that these works can be preserved for the ages
- Clearinghouse that allows others to search for video or music, download it, and reuse or remix it, with proper attribution. All legally.
Interesting factoids:
- Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive who became a dotcom multimillionaire when he sold Alexa to Amazon, is supporting Ourmedia with free storage and free bandwidth to help spur the grassroots media revolution
- The project encompasses technology, creative culture, copyright law and education, and brings together an unusual coalition of heavy hitters in those fields.
- In some ways, Ourmedia will compete against profit-oriented start-ups that have begun to move into the podcasting, photo album hosting and video hosting arenas.
- People have a hard time believing that the ethos of the library — access to free cultural
- materials — can exist in cyberspace. We’re reminding people that they have the right to freely draw upon millions of works in the public domain and under share licenses.
New technologies and cultural developments Ourmedia is involved with:
- Podcasting: free hosting, bandwidth and storage for personal audio broadcasts.
- Videoblogging: free hosting, bandwidth and storage for videoblogs.
- P2P: Support for BitTorrent as a legal way to share each others’ works (soon).
- Fair Use Zone: for discussions about how and when students and others may borrow copyrighted music or images to incorporate into their own works.
- License searching: allows users to search on every piece of media available for remixing. Ourmedia will serve as an enabler of legal remix culture.
- RSS: automatic subscriptions available to every media category on the site.
Why Ourmedia is needed:
- Exposure: Ourmedia will serve as a hub for personal works, surfacing the best works and garnering visibility for creators.
- Ease of use: It has gotten easy and cheap to create digital works such as movie shorts or photo galleries. It is still far too difficult to easily share them with a large audience.
- Education: By sharing works and trading insights about best practices, Ourmedia members will help advance the craft of digital creativity.
- Preservation: On regular Web sites, personal works often suffer link rot, becoming inaccessible after a few months or years. Ourmedia will preserve these works for the ages.
For more information:
J.D. Lasica, co-founder
(925) 600-0639 in the San Francisco area
jdlasica@gmail.com
AIM: jdlas
Marc Canter, co-founder
(925) 705-0342 (cell)
email: marc@canter.com
AIM: MarcCanter
