ON OURMEDIA.ORG AND PERSONAL MEDIA

WELCOME TO THE PM REVOLUTION...

where PM stands for Personal Media...at least that's what the newest company for distributing video and any other kind of media sans any distribution gateway calls it...the home page for Ourmedia.org is less dramatic than the title above, asking the visitor to merely "join the Personal Media Revolution"...I'll call it PMR...it has the possibility of being the latest meme on the web.

What makes Ourmedia.org interesting?  (Disclosure:  I have no affiliation with the company)...on the surface it looks like Flickr meets Personal Media, with tags yet to come, I assume...then, right up front, they promise:

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

Amongst the founders are Marc Canter, co-founder of Macromedia, Brewster Kahle of  Thinking Machines, WAIS, Alexa Internet, and Internet Archive fame, and J.D. Lasica, a writer, editor with the Online Journalism Review.  Interestingly, another video distribution company on the web that I've noted in other posts is Brightcove, which is founded by the Jeremy Allaire, former Chief Technology Officer of Macromedia.  The organization is an open-source, all-volunteer effort as mentioned on the FAQ page.

What caught my eye, aside from the people involved, is some of the content on the site even in its current alpha stage.  I particularly like Sam Bisbee's music webvideo (my term) for the song "You are here" done in Quicktime.  It's definitely worth a listen and a play.

The final item of interest here is the open-source community nature of this...given the success of non-for-profit open-source projects like Mozilla, Firefox, and Wikipedia, it'll be interesting to see if a similar approach applied to Personal Media can succeed...stay tuned...

Comments

[Alex Rowland]

The PM revolution is indeed coming. An interesting issue remains whether providers of broadband services (DSL or cable) will continue to provide a free lunch to these disintermediaries. This is a clear threat to their business model (they won't earn anything from the content sent over their connections under current all-you-can-eat consumer agreements). The more prevalent this becomes the more likely we are to see some sort of reaction from the telcos and/or the cablecos. They don't want to be pipes and wires only. That's a path to low margins a far as the eye can see.

[Michael Parekh]

That is the critical question...not sure they'll be able to do much about it by then because hopefully they'll be in intense competition with each other for the incremental customer. This is not dissimilar to when the telcos wanted to be the portals on the "dial-up" web a few years ago, but gave it up after trying, failing, and realizing that it required an entirely different skill set to compete, and that it got in the way of their really acquiring customers through partnerships with portals. With folks like Yahoo! moving into content distribution, this is a scenario that'll likely play out again...we'll see...