The wonderful Jo Twist, technology reporter for BBC News (whom I met at Gnomedex), has a writeup about Ourmedia: Citizens do media for themselves. Excerpt:
There is a big transition happening between traditional, top down media and bubble-up, grassroots, emerging media,” says JD Lasica, co-founder of Ourmedia.org, a finalist in the e-inclusion category of the UN’s World Summit Awards.
“We want to help that bottom part emerge and flourish. Technology is easier to use and cheap enough to put into the hands of almost anybody with a modest budget.”
Part of the reason is the emergence of easy-to-use, multimedia tools for self-publishing, such as blogs or podcasts.
‘Breathtakingly creative’
JD Lasica’s Ourmedia is a place online where anyone can publish their own digital home movie, music, photos, or even plain old blog for free.
The “free” bit comes courtesy of support from The Internet Archive project. Its mission has been to document and keep a slice of digital life of how the web has evolved over the last decade.
It’s a godsend for people who cannot afford spiralling bandwidth costs. JD hopes to take advantage of peer-to-peer file-sharing distribution in the future.
Since its inception in March 2005, not-for-profit Ourmedia has attracted more than 31,000 international members, and now plays host to 22,000 separate pieces of media, from travelogs to tastes of family life.
More than half is video, with video blogs – or vlogs – proving highly popular. Some of it is of “breathtakingly creative”, says JD.
It encourages people to upload and publish the content using Creative Commons licences, which means they can decide the terms of use for their material. It also encourages a “remix culture”.
“Right now our lead video is blind banjo player in Tibet someone had filmed. This is what we were hoping for; to bring us all into one media village.
“It shows that creativity and entertainment does not have to come from Hollywood and big media, but that we all have this innate talent to tell stories and to entertain each other,” says JD. …
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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