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.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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