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...
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