New at the Learning Center

New at the Personal Media Learning Center — some of it created by the Ourmedia staff, some of it republished with permission:

8 ways to shoot video like a pro

All about digital audio

A simple guide to publishing audio on the Web   

How to add voice narration to a slide show 

Video editing software choices

Self-publishing a book 

Top 7 free video editing software products 

Personal media glossary

Adding identifying info to music files

Fixing unbalanced sound levels

All about aspect ratio

All about the widescreen format

The Pan and scan technique

How to remix content

Five rules for building a successful online community

How to make a stop-motion video short

What EXIF data do digital photos contain?

Where to find photos for remixing

Updated:

How to record Internet radio (or any audio)

New servers for Ourmedia

This morning we pulled the switch and moved over to new servers to host the Ourmedia.org site at San Francisco State University. The site's apparently visible to a lot of people, but not to me -- it's taking the new DNS name servers more than 12 hours to populate so far.

Valenti gives Ourmedia a big thumbs-up

The other day I spotted Jack Valenti, who headed the MPAA for nearly 39 years before stepping down last year, at a lunch table at the Aspen Institute. So I introduced myself and we had a nice chat for a half hour. I devote half of Chapter 2 in Darknet to Valenti and the MPAA. His son, John, has been one of the biggest cheerleaders of the book and its central message: that the entertainment industries need to embrace their digital future by adopting new business models. The senior Valenti had nice things to say about the book as well.

So I whipped out my cell phone and Jack agreed to sit for a video interview. In this 90-second clip, he talks about grassroots creativity seen on video sharing sites like Ourmedia. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Unveiling the Ourmedia Learning Center and Open Media Directory

Ourmedia is proud to announce the unveiling of the Personal Media Learning Center as well as the Open Media Directory.

The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.

There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We're starting out with the subjects of Personal media - Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.

We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you'd like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines and contact me. This is media training of the people by the people.

The Open Media Directory is a clearinghouse of dozens of different sites where you can find legal, podsafe music, audio and video clips. For anyone who wants to add a music soundtrack to their online video or add music to a podcast, the Open Media Directory is a treasure. Thanks to the UK's David Holmes, the directory's editor, for pulling it together for us.

These projects represent a significant step forward for Ourmedia. We've been promised new servers this month, so look for more improvements in the site in the weeks ahead.

Blogger dinner in Milan

Had a fantastico time last night at a blogger dinner organized by Paolo Valdemarin, a consultant who's one of the big thinkers in Italy's social media scene. The gathering at Il Verdi Trattoria in Milano brought together 17 people, including Massimo Esposti, whose new Unwired Media publishing venture (see the Area 51 blog) will debut next month with the Italian version of Darknet. (Howard Rheingold's preface and the Introduction are available for a free download in Italian.)

Also met Fausto, Marco Zamperini, Gianluca Brugnoli, Andrea Lawendel, Luca Lizzeri, Giogio Baresi and several other great folks. I'm hoping we can get a few volunteers in Italy to help out with Ourmedia; we're looking for moderators, coders and administrators.

Earlier in the day Deirdre Straughan gave us a tour of the offices of TVBlob, an interactive communication startup using TV and broadband. (Deirdre was a welcome addition to the blogger dinner as well.) Stayed for two nights at Deirdre's place in Lecco, and I'll post some video and a slew of photos when I get back. (When you've spent years mastering Photoshop, it's hard to bring yourself to upload photos that need lightening, cropping and sharpening.) So far: Rome, Venice, Lake Como and Milano. Just got to Florence. More soon.

Q&A at WorldChanging

At WorldChanging, Micki Krimmel has an interview with me about citizens media and Ourmedia. Excerpt:

One of the big changes we want to make on Ourmedia in the next few months is to make it more of a community-centric site. The world doesn’t need another YouTube. I’m not picking on You Tube, but they’re the ones who are getting all the attention today. There are plenty of sites now where you can just upload your funny video, right? We want to get to a place where more people can feel like they’re doing something - they’re creating video for a social purpose. So, if your passion is all about local politics or the environment or energy or global warming, you should be able to share your thoughts in a text blog or video or podcast.

What's coming at Ourmedia

Ryanne Hodson caught up with me in South Park (the San Francisco landmark, not the TV show) a couple of days ago and posted this video interview about what's coming at Ourmedia.

Happy birthday to Ourmedia

Ourmedia launched one year ago today!

Little did we realize how influential we'd become in helping to spur the citizens media movement. We now have 87,000 members and about 150,000 works of personal media that people have uploaded -- video, audio, photos and more.

Our first year was about giving people the power to share their media. This next one will be more about helping people to create better media, to collect and to discover great grassroots media. We've launched a preliminary Digital Media Learning Center and have ambitious plans for the rest of the site.

Wish us luck as we embark on a slightly new course!

A podcast about Web 2.0

A second podcast went up today, this one by Drew Olanoff of The Blog Factory. In this 20-minute podcast, we talk about Darknet, Ourmedia, Web 2.0, citizens media and where podcasting and blogging are going.

New leadership roles at Ourmedia

Ourmedia has two new board members:

Joining our Board of Directors is John Seely Brown.

JSB is one of the most revered figures in Silicon Valley. For many years he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He describes himself as being "deeply involved in the management of radical innovation and in the formation of corporate strategy and strategic positioning of Xerox as The Document Company." In 2004 he was inducted into the Industry Hall of Fame. He is also the author of several books.

Joining our Board of Advisors is Susan Wu, whom I hope to meet in person on Friday.

Susan is Chief Marketing Officer of the Apache Software Foundation, where she helps define the organization's overall strategy and leads its PR, branding, partnership and marketing activities. The Apache Software Foundation is one of the world's most influential open source software organizations, with over 1,200 contributors, 35 major product groups, and 70% global market share in web server software.

Susan's roots in the open source community stems from her long-abiding interest in how technology catalyzes social and economic change. She began her career as the chief architect of a multiplayer gaming environment hailed by Sony Online Entertainment's Chief Creative Officer as revolutionary and one of the best of its time. In Susan's spare time, she has remained active in online gaming. She was the Executive Producer of GXMod, a widely popular, award winning Quake 2 modification. Susan also contributed as a developer and project manager to the open source Nebula 3D Graphics and Game Engine. She was also one of the leaders of a 1,000 person guild within the MMORPG Asheron's Call.

Which sounds pretty impressive, even to us non-MMORPGies.

Reuters CEO lauds MySpace, Stupidvideos -- and Ourmedia

From today's Jossip:

Over at Forbes it's Rich Karlgaard reporting from the Heathrow airport in London that puts a little extra step on our day.

He was mediating a panel discussion about the internet in which Tom Glocer [photo above], CEO of Reuters, explains how consumers want to create their own media, internet is changing, bloggers, yada yada. And then he busted out (yep!) his MySpace profile.

Glocer told the audience of 260 gathered at the Landmark Hotel to study three websites that herald the consumer-driven future: www.myspace.com; www.stupidvideos.com; and www.ourmedia.org. Glocer showed us his own blog page on myspace.

The media world has been changed forever, Glocer said, by the Internet's scale of distribution and by the phenomenal ease of search ...

Ourmedia: Stage 2 of the revolution

I spent Monday in Southern California at a strategy session organized by developer/videoblogger Markus Sandy at his house in Ojai. About eight of us, plus another eight developers in a Flash meeting, charted out the next phase of Ourmedia -- stage 2 of the personal media revolution.

Among the items on tap in the next few months:

• Social media: We want to introduce such features as playlists, tagging, ratings, rankings and more robust group functionalities. Ourmedia has always been about personal media; now we need to become a true community site by turning personal media into social media -- a shared experience.

• Learning Center: We've just launched the outlines of a digital media learning center -- but we could use your help. We want this to be the hub for learning how to create and share all kinds of personal media: videoblogs, podcasts, digital storytelling, digital photography, games, oral histories, digital music and more. We'll be sharing the contents of our learning library with other sites, such as Wikipedia.

• Remix Center: We'll be developing our own toolset, as well as partnering with others (hopefully Dabble), to create a suite of tools that let our members access freely available content and commercially llicensed music to use in mash-up videos, audio works and photos.

• Dynamic front page: We've been wanting for some time to move to a model in which the community decides which media items display on the front page, through member rankings. A redesigned user interface will change the contents of the front page several times an hour.

• Window to the world: We want Ourmedia to be not just a walled-garden destination website but a window to many grassroots media repositories.

• Open source: To fulfill this vision, we need to find more developers who are willing to get involved in this open source project.

Longer term, we're still committed to improved search, open standards, an open registry to make sharing and accessing multimedia easier, and to working with others on a distributed commercial marketplace to let artists earn money from their long-tail works.

We need coders, designers, moderators and other volunteers to take our nonprofit open media project to the next level. Who wants to help?

Top 5 'sweet websites'

The Pacer, the online student newspaper at the University of Tennessee, Martin: Top five “sweet” websites.
Five websites that will enahnce your experience on the Internet.

1. LivePlasma, a music discovery site
2. Ourmedia, free storage and bandwidth for your digital media
3. YouSendIt, prevent attachments from bouncing (up to 1GB)
4. Gmail, Google's email application
5. Artpad, create and play back animations

Howard Rheingold goes far

Strange, but the 90-second MPEG-4 video interview I shot of author Howard Rheingold on the Stanford campus, urging people to support Ourmedia, wound up on YouTube as a Flash movie. Hey, we'll take the publicity.

China's version of Ourmedia

Here's an English-language interview with Gary Wang, founder of Toodou, a new user-generated, interactive, multimedia content website in China that sounds remarkably like Ourmedia.org. They have 120,000 registered users and tons of podcasts.

Upload, store, play, share

David Pogue in today's NY Times: Upload, Store, Play and Share in a Few Clicks.

Glide Effortless, a new Web service that went live yesterday, [is] a personal Web site (www.glidedigital.com) to which you can upload your favorite photos, MP3 files, video clips and even Word, PowerPoint or PDF documents. (A separate companion program speeds the uploading process by letting you drag and drop big batches of files at once.) Once everything's posted on the Web site, you can do two things with it: manage it or share it. ...

Glide ... treats each file type - photos, songs, videos, documents - nearly identically, representing each file as a thumbnail icon in your personal stash. You use a menu to switch from one "environment" (say, photos) to another (like music). At the bottom of each environment is an area where you can create "containers" - that is, playlists (for music and video clips), albums (for photos), address book groups (for e-mail), and so on. You fill up these containers by simply dragging the appropriate thumbnails from the top part of the screen. You can even drag music files into photo or video containers, thereby creating musical soundtracks.

When you want other people to see your stuff, you can send invitations by e-mail. ... When your recipients click the link in your message, they arrive at a Glide Web page, where they can view or play the files.

And from Dawn Chmielewski in the San Jose Merc on Tuesday: New application lets you manage all media files in Web browser.

Glide Effortless lets you store, organize and share every piece of media you own -- every digital photo, every song, every piece of video and every document -- through a Web browser.

There is no shortage of ways to, say, share your photo albums online, or upload videos. But this is the first time anyone has created a single Web-based repository -- a multimedia scrapbook, if you will -- for sharing every little bit we make, online.

Well, Ourmedia is a Web-based repository for letting you share every photo, every video, every song, every document that you've created. And, unlike Glide Effortless, it's free. The only catch is you have to be willing to share your works with everyone else.

So you want to be an Internet star

Business Week: So You Want To Be An Internet Star. All you need is a script, a PC, and a short list of gear. Excerpt:

Your host with the most

Before you start, you'll need one more thing: a program for recording, mixing, and editing your audio. Audacity works well for beginners, and you can't beat the price. If you have a recent Macintosh, you probably have a copy of GarageBand, a more sophisticated piece of audio software. The latest version is part of Apple's $79 iLife '05 Suite. Want to see your script roll before your eyes like a TelePrompTer? The $250 ePodcast Producer from Industrial Audio Software can do that and let you record Internet-based phone calls from guests or listeners, too.

Once you've recorded your show, export the audio file as an MP3, the preferred format for podcasts. Be sure to edit the ID3 tags that describe your audio file for listeners. Then upload it to a Web server. Your Net provider likely gives you space you could use, but if your podcast catches fire, it might strain the bandwidth and get you in trouble. A better option is Ourmedia.org, which hosts your podcast and stores archived shows for free. If you have a blog, post a link there to let your readers know the podcast is ready. ...

Ourmedia: 50,000 members and counting

We just issued a press announcement about Ourmedia hitting the 50,000-member mark.

Member No. 50,000 is Pastor John Rewald of the Oasis New Life Centre in Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, who published an mp3 of his most recent church sermon.

We also filed for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status with the IRS this week. And we named two new members to our Advisory Board. As someone once said, We're rockin' the house!

Now, we need some corporate sponsorships and foundation support to make this thing really fly.

Ourmedia cracks the top 100

Ourmedia has cracked the list of 100 most popular blogs, as tracked by Technorati link love. We're at #99.

Ourmedia: a Best of Blogs finalist

The nominees for the Deutsche Welle's 2005 international Best of the Blogs competition -- the BOBs -- were announced today. More than 100 Weblogs will be judged by the Internet community in 13 categories.

BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone was on the jury that narrowed the list of 2,500+ nominated blogs to a list of about 100 finalists in various categories, such as:
• Best blog overall
• Best podcast
• Best multimedia blog
• Best journalistic blog

Ourmedia is nominated for Best Multimedia Blog. So, please vote! If you're online, you can vote.

Some of these are sites that maintain group or individual blogs (like Ourmedia, New West, Global Voices), others are solo blog efforts, like Zadi Diaz's Karmagrrl. Congrats to all the nominees.

You can vote through Nov. 20. I'm not crazy about the idea of displaying the voting results as they come in, but there you go.

Who will help with Ourmedia's next projects?

Wow, just got out of the Open Media Developers Summit at NYU in Greenwich Village. About 70 developers, filmmakers, citizens media advocates and other creative people came together, exchanged ideas, and agreed to continue the conversation.

Ourmedia received an extraordinarily warm reception there.

I'm in a taxi as I write this (don't think it's wired for wifi), but should be able to file from the JetBlue hub at JFK.

Among the people I finally had a chance to meet in person: Clay Shirky (finally!! -- especially given the fact that he's quoted on at least eight pages of "Darknet"), Lucas Gonze (the playlist king -- see Webjay), Kent Bye (the Echo Chamber Project, which I blogged about below), Jim Vinson of DivX, Peter van Dyk (MeFeedia), Kenyatta Cheese, and Drazin Pantic. Also was great to see Mary Hodder, Jay Dedman, Ryan Hodson, Elizabeth Osder, and a host of others.

I showed the flag for Ourmedia and reminded folks of the project's original name -- Open Media (open-media.org) -- before we changed it when I discovered that "Open Media" was a trademarked term. Also mentioned that I sponsored a Citizens media summit in San Francisco in May that had very similar goals.

I came to this gathering with three goals in mind. One was to look for a CTO for Ourmedia -- we're in the process of getting funded and have a six-figure salary set aside in our 2006 budget for a kick-ass getting-your-hands-dirty-with Drupal tech nerd and open-standards evangelist. So if you know of anyone who fits the bill, send her or him my way.

The second goal was to connect with forward-thinking folks on the open-media front lines of corporate America, and I had some good conversations with reps from Nokia, Reuters, DivX and Yahoo! about how they might be able to support and work with citizens media efforts like Ourmedia.

The third, perhaps most important goal was to explore ways to bring these open media projects together in real terms, both on the development side (code and content) but also with the goal of creating real interoperability between these open media repositories. During the closing summing-up, I cited three opportunities for collaboration between the attendees. And we hope you, dear reader, will also volunteer to hop aboard these projects:

1. Learning Center: One of the key new initiatives dead ahead for Ourmedia is the creation of a digital media learning center and open knowledge base. The idea is simple: Ourmedia has been focused on creating a community space around sharing personal media. Now we want to get involved in helping people create media.

Want to learn how to create a podcast? Boom, here's a quick tutorial. How about creating a videoblog and getting it syndicated and hooked up to iTunes? We'll tell you how. Want to learn about digital storytelling? We'll provide a step-by-step process.

The Learning Center will begin with links to existing efforts in the field, such as vblog and Node101 and FireAnt and other grassroots efforts. We're currently forming a discussion group and wiki to bring professors and students at educational institutions into the process (we hope Stanford, NYU, USC, Harvard, Duke and others become involved).

We'll also be calling up experts in various areas (know your mpeg4 codecs? know how to take a great digital photo? we want to hear from you) and calling upon the wisdom of the community in creating user-generated content. Everyone who contributes will be recognized and credited for your contributions (unless you insist on anonymity).

2. Remix Center: I'm passionate about the idea of creating an area for people to come to legally download video, audio and photographs that can be downloaded for remixing. I believe there's a creative ferment and energy just waiting to explode around this idea. We'll be collaborating with Creative Commons, Drupal developers, open-source code jockeys, artists, content creators and others in the coming weeks and months to make it happen. If you support Remix Culture, please join our effort.

3. Open registry: Marc Canter and I have been talking for some time about creating a global registry project to interconnect open media repositories, so that users can easily access hundreds of thousands and soon to be millions of grassroots media works -- our content, not the inaccessible stuff locked away behind DRM and paid archives.

Charles Nesson, founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has a lofty vision of a Digital Library of Alexandria -- and wants to hold a conference or summit next year to start hammering out a game plan for interoperability. Charles wants to help forge a massive mirrored database that interconnects not just citizens media repositories but hundreds of major libraries as well -- making nearly all the world's knowledge available at the click of a mouse. It's an extraordinary opportunity and challenge.

In the short run, I told the group, let's begin the journey. Let's take a few strides down that road by building a modest glue factory so that we can start bonding these repositories (Ourmedia, NowPublic.com, Undergroundfilm.org, etc.) to each other so that users can access personal media and create media jukeboxes and image albums and directories regardless of what servers they're located on.

Interested in climbing aboard the citizens media bandwagon? It's still early. Let me know.

There. Not bad for a taxi ride.

Technorati tags: openmediasummit, omds, HonorTagJournalism

Indymedia and Ourmedia

In the past few weeks, I've heard several people comment that they don't know if there's a need for Indymedia anymore now that Ourmedia is thriving.

Well, I don't know about that.

The latest addition to this discussion comes out of Indymedia UK, where someone named "n" posted an essay with this bottom line:

Anyone looking to jump ship might like to check out Ourmedia - it's far from what's needed to replace Indymedia. It has no direct equivilent to the newswires but with its integration of RSS syndication, personal and group blogs, podcasts, video archives, video RSS etc. it has great potential.

In many ways Indymedia has no equal. It is an anti-authoritarian network and it has without doubt contributed a great deal to our common struggles. However, in my opinion, in it's current form it's days are numbered and the cracks are starting to show.

We've said all along that Ourmedia doesn't want to be the borg, sucking in all the universe's personal media. We're about inclusion and connecting open media repositories together.

So we'll be happy, when the time comes, to discuss sharing video, podcasts, tools and other materials with Indymedia. We don't have a political agenda. But we do think that millions of people picking up the tools of the personal media revolution will change the world.

Ourmedia's Top 100 media items

Ourmedia's lead moderator, Jeff Kowalski, has created pages for the most popular media items on Ourmedia since our launch:

Top 100 videos
Top 100 audio files
Top 100 photographs
Top 100 text works

Top, as in most popular. We're currently working on creating tools to surface the best materials.

Ourmedia hits two milestones

Congratulations to marce from Los Angeles, who became the 40,000th member of Ourmedia over the weekend. Not bad for a 5-month-old site!

We just achieved another milestone as well: Ourmedia has been approved by California's secretary of state as a not-for-profit corporation. So, you can start writing those big checks now to help support the grassroots media revolution! (Be aware, however, that we're still in a transitional phase until we receive the IRS's official stamp of approval as a nonprofit.)

Looking for moderators

The nonprofit site Ourmedia.org needs more volunteer moderators. If you've got any spare time and want to support grassroots media, here's your chance. (You can contact me here.) BoingBoing gives us some love today.

Ourmedia cracks the Feedster top 100

After less than five months, Ourmedia.org is No. 90 in the Feedster Top 500, which measures inbound links. That's ahead of other aggregator sites like FlickrBlog and the Podcast Network. Not bad.

Lessons of Ourmedia

Today WorldChanging has an excellent writeup on, and analysis of the potentials of, Ourmedia.

By promising permanent free hosting and almost no restrictions on media, Ourmedia has the potential to become the cornerstone of an alternative media system. It's also suggestive of where activism may go in the months and years to come. ...

Ourmedia is still in alpha, with many features yet to be implemented; nonetheless, it currently has over 34,000 publishers uploading material to the site. It's easy to find fault with the current version -- and not so easy to get a good connection for some of the content -- but it's not hard to see the potential this system contains. Given a good tagging, searching and rating system (imagine a Technorati model on top of the content, for example), Ourmedia could provide a powerful alternative to traditional media, both for news and information as well as entertainment.

But what struck me about Ourmedia was the model it suggests for future activism. I've written before about the "green panopticon," the notion that abundant networked video capture tools (e.g., cameraphones) would enable a kind of information sharing about both problems and solutions. Previous discussion of such a system focused on the tools for creating the video stories; this, then, is the other end of that system, the mechanism for sharing the material. The same logic -- distributed collection, archival publication -- would apply to other kinds of political or activist media. I would expect to see, for example, a nascent online archive of personal videos of campaign rallies and candidate meetings by the 2006 election in the US, and a widely-used system by 2008. Just as savvy political figures in 2004 saw the utility of blogs and "meetup" groups, cutting-edge candidates in 2008 will be taking advantage of a distribution method for interviews and conversations with voters that is both more personal and able to bypass the gatekeepers at the cable news media.

That assumes, of course, that Americans embrace the system. But there are good reasons to believe that, despite its US origins, Ourmedia could come to be dominated by voices from outside of North America. The first is the slower use of cameraphones and the like in the US (PDF); the more widespread use of mobile networked video devices (as well as faster mobile networks) in Europe and Asia means more potential source material. The second is the slower broadband growth in the US; it's simply easier (and, in most cases, cheaper) for people in much of Europe and Asia to upload and download larger media files. ...

I'll be talking with Zack Rosen and Sean over at the grassroots civic action site CivicSpace (another Drupal site) about a closer working relationship in the months to come. We'll also be talking with Brewster at the Internet Archive about a broader global role for Ourmedia and Archive.

But we can't do this alone. We need some institutional support for our (so far wildly successful) efforts.

A podcast about Ourmedia

John Furrier, who has quickly become one of the stars of the podcast world, has a 10-minute podcast with me about Ourmedia up at Podtech.net, conducted at Gnomedex in late June.

Steve Outing at E-Media Tidbits also has some kind words about our nonprofit initiative.

Vlogging on your personal web page

Since we set up Groups on Ourmedia last month, several of them -- such as Videoblogging (742 members) and Flickr (211 members) -- have just taken off. Now that RSS 2.0 is working on the site, it means that not only can people subscribe to your video, audio, photo and text feeds, but you can also list your works and feeds on your own blog or website and people can subscribe to them there.

Today, Windsong described the process for doing so:

Here is the info on how to move you ourmedia page xml and mrss (short for My rss newsfeed) newsfeed to your personal web page wherever it might be on the web.

Step 1. [Log in to Ourmedia, then] go to My Controls and Open My Page.

Step 2.Once at your page view the source.

Step 3. Open note pad, you will need it.

Step 4. scroll down the source till you find a line that starts with div class="xml-icon copy that line to notepad for editing.

Step 5.you will need to add http://www.ourmedia.org/ after href=" and scr=" anywhere in the line you find it to tell the browser where to look for the rss and xml button and where to go.

Step 6. you should delete any thing not inside of the anchor symbols which are the a's with the < or> around them,anything next to the a counts. also the ref to & nbsp; & nbsp; as that relates to internal ourmedia stuff that won't work on your server.

Step 7.Take what you have left on note pad and paste it to you web page wherever you want it to appear. you can use br to space it. your done.

Publish your page. If you did it right you will see the xml and mrrs button appear on your web page now when a visitor to your web page clicks on the button he will be subscribed to your personal feed here. anytime you post new work here they will get it in there feed.Now you can vlog like a Pro with your feed on your own web page from ourmedia!!

Video sites seek short-form Scorseses

Wired News: Bigwigs Seek Short-Form Scorseses.

Next week, Al Gore's new 24-hour internet and cable television network, Current TV, will open its doors, providing a diet of three-to-five-minute news, arts and entertainment videos for young people.

Meanwhile, Canadian Broadcasting's youth arts program ZeD TV has been pumping out short segments both on television and online for the past year. And Bravo adapted filmmaker Rob Thomas' short comedy Significant Others into a TV series.

Now, major internet portals MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Google are getting into the game as well. They're adding amateur videos and short films to their collections of music videos, TV segments and movie trailers to build out what will no doubt emerge as the internet's answer to cable television. ...

the big internet portals are forging distribution deals with AtomFilms and Ifilm for video content. The former is working with AOL, Yahoo and MSN while the latter is working with Yahoo and AOL. Both Ifilm and AtomFilms post a steady flow of films ranging from low-quality home video to highly produced short films and animated features. ...

After weathering the internet crash in 2001, both Ifilm and AtomFilms have become hot properties, currently drawing between 6 million and 8 million unique visitors per month. ...

"We're moving from a text-based internet to multimedia internet," said J.D. Lasica, executive director of Ourmedia, a free site for posting video. "So video is becoming a full-blown phenomenon on the internet."

All of the bandwidth you'll ever need

Hiawatha Bray interviews me about Ourmedia in today's Boston Globe: All of the bandwidth you'll ever need. Excerpt:

It's the Internet's favorite price point: zero. From software to movie trailers, the freebies just keep coming. Usually they're come-ons, designed to focus our eyeballs on digital advertisements. But some online giveaways are utterly devoid of strings, and utterly compelling. ...

It's surprising to learn that only 28,000 Internet users have signed up at Ourmedia, a new Internet service that's giving away both storage and bandwidth, for personal use, at no charge. Any podcaster, text blogger, or video blogger can sign up for a free account at ourmedia.com, and publish as much as he wants, for as long as he wants.

It sounds like a classic Internet come-on: free bandwidth in exchange for a flood of on-screen advertisements. But Ourmedia's not driven by a quest for profit. It's the latest venture of the Internet Archive, an ongoing effort to catalog and preserve every document posted online. Brewster Kahle, a veteran of the long-gone Cambridge supercomputer firm Thinking Machines, launched the archive in 1996, with money earned from a successful Internet business venture. Today, the archive, located online at www.archive.org, gets funding from multiple sources, including the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. It contains about 40 billion pages spanning most of the Web's history. ...

Despite the Internet Archive's vast size, it had plenty of unused disk space. Which is why Internet publishers can publish their biggest, fattest multimedia files on the Ourmedia servers for free -- a price that Lasica said will never increase.

That's easy to say with just 28,000 users. But after reading this, legions of Boston Globe readers will no doubt sign up, then tell their friends. Next thing you know, Ourmedia has several million users and a massive bill for storage and bandwidth. How can tthe company keep giving it away?

''We're going to look for different additional partnerships," said Lasica. ...

With corporate financial and technical support, Ourmedia could become the Internet's richest and most user-friendly multimedia site -- and for publishers, definitely the cheapest. It's such an appealing vision that it's sure to enrich someone. Not Lasica, Canter, and Kahle, perhaps. But certainly the rest of us.

The ins and outs of Ourmedia

The O'Reilly Network's Richard Koman has an interview with me about Ourmedia.org.

Publish your vlog to Ourmedia

Here's part 2 of Katie Dean's series on videoblogging: Man Cleans Freezer, Film at 11. The piece includes a quick primer on how to publish your vlog to Ourmedia.

Know any Python coders?

Nathan Yergler, the Creative Commons coder who's done a fantastic job upgrading and extending the basic ccPublisher tool into a slicker Ourmedia Publisher tool -- which lets you publish virtually any kind of media file to Ourmedia -- won't be able to continue upgrading the tool going forward because he's returning to school.

So if you know of any Python developers who would like to take this over and contribute to the public commons, please let me know

Slowing the flow of illicit uploads

I'm interviewed in a story in today's San Jose Mercury News: Slowing the flow of illicit uploads. Excerpt:

The recent emergence of Web sites that encourage the public to upload copies of their own video and audio content is highlighting the difficulties of controlling the illicit spread of copyrighted material.

The new sites are coming online at a time when technology is making it increasingly easy for ordinary people to copy, record, edit and upload video and audio content to the Web. ...

Ourmedia, a non-profit ``grass-roots media'' Web site, was launched in March, soliciting independently made video, audio and text files. Since the service opened, administrators have seen about four dozen instances in which users uploaded copyrighted material, a fraction of the 14,000 files currently hosted on the site, said Pleasanton's J.D. Lasica, co-founder of Ourmedia.

Ourmedia does not screen content before it is uploaded to the site, Lasica said. But volunteer site administrators perform spot-checks ``after the fact.''

The site made it clear from the outset that it would not tolerate uploads of copyrighted material.

``We decided early on, even though we're not technically liable, that we don't want to open the floodgates,'' Lasica said. ``We said, let's focus on `our media,' not `their media.' ''

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the onus on Internet users to act responsibly when it comes to copyrighted material -- and for Web sites and Internet service providers to step in when they don't. So Web sites such as Google or Ourmedia are not required to screen content when it is uploaded to their servers. But they must respond quickly when they find out that copyrighted material may have been inappropriately placed on their systems.

Ourmedia a finalist in UN World Summit Awards

The United Nations World Summit Awards are an international competition created in 2003 to highlight the most innovative digital content being created around the world. The awards coincide with the 2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), an international UN summit that will take place in Tunisia this November. More than 150 countries around the world are expected to nominate digital content in a variety of categories, such as e-government, e-education and e-entertainment, to compete among each other for the international award, to be announced later this fall.

Andy Carvin, coordinator of the US competition, worked with a team of about a dozen judges from around the country, soliciting nominations from around the Internet, then reaching their decisions for US finalists in eight different categories. After reviewing numerous nominations in the e-inclusion category -- the UN's term for initiatives that are helping bridge the digital divide, utilizing the Internet to empower the public, etc. -- the judges have just whittled down the list to a single US finalist:

Ourmedia.

Congratulations, everyone. This is simply amazing. We're only 3 1/2 months old -- and already being recognized on the international stage.

BBC Radio reports on Ourmedia

I was interviewed by Rhod Sharp of BBC News about Ourmedia for BBC Radio's Up All Night program. You can speed through the clip to if you speed through this link to about 0245, in the second hour, to hear the five-minute snippet.

The Open Media 100

I'd heard a rumor that I was a likely finalist for the inaugural AlwaysOn Technorati Open Media 100. Early this morning the list was announced and I made the cut. Thank you, quite the honor! These are folks who are deeply involved in the open media movement. I was probably selected because of my role as co-founder and exec director of Ourmedia.

Lots of familiar names here (and many of them are here at Supernova). Some include: Craig Newmark, Dan and Steve Gillmor, Mary Hodder, Doug Kaye, Cory. Mark, Xeni and David of BoingBoing, Doc Searls, John Battelle, Adam Curry, Larry Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls, Duncan Black, Rebecca Blood, Marc Canter, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Esther Dyson, David Hornik, Joi Ito, Pierre Omidyar, Bram Cohen, Mark Cuban, Ana Marie Cox, Clay Shirky, Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Eric Rice, Om Malik, Glenn Reynolds, Steve Rubel, Jonathan Schwartz, Chris Pirillo, Josh Marshall, Om Malik, Ev Williams, Josh Schachter, Ben and Mena Trott, Ross Mayfield, Robert Scoble, Andrew Sullivan, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Joe Trippi, Jeff Jarvis, Brewster Kahle, Meg Hourihan and many others whose names you might recognize. Nice company.

The Open Media 100 is also the cover story of AlwaysOn's summer print "blogozine." Tony Perkins and co. just shipped 100,000 copies this week.

Very cool. I had already planned to attend the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford next month, which is perhaps the best-managed tech conference during the course of the year.

Ourmedia looks to bring video to social networking

TechWeb at Yahoo News: Ourmedia Looks To Bring Video To Social Networking.

"Our mission is to advance the personal-media revolution," Lasica said. "We're not going to put big media out of business, but there's a real wellspring of creativity at the grassroots level that we've seen over the last several years."

Video content set free on Web

From CNET News.com today: Video content set free on Web.

"We see an opportunity to help kick-start the grassroots media revolution," said J.D. Lasica, [executive director] of recently launched Ourmedia, which hosts video for free. "We're still at an early stage of the multimedia-rich Web. The Web is not going to be Web logs and text; it's going to be people posting video and podcasting and taking part in the citizens' media [revolution] that's just starting to explode."

Ourmedia empowers content producers

EContent Magazine: One for All and All for One: Ourmedia.org Empowers Content Producers.

Remixing the blogosphere

Danny Bradbury in Thursday's Guardian Unlimited (UK): Remixing the blogosphere. Indie hubs allow creative types to produce, share and 'mash' content online. Here's a report on a media revolution.

Sites mentioned include Transom.org, Public Radio Exchange, NowPublic, Wikinews and the academic OurMediaNet.

Excerpt:

Ourmedia.org, which was set up in March by JD Lasica and Marc Canter, has an even wider remit, taking all types of audio, visual, and animated work. With 22,000 members, the site (not to be confused with Rodriguez's OurMedia academic group) is becoming a popular way to upload and distribute home-cooked content.

"There were a lot of amazing works that I was coming across ," says Lasica. "I thought to myself, why can't we put this on a single site somewhere on the web so that everyone can access this work?"

Ourmedia.org's free membership allows you to upload any legal con