‘Ourmedia powers the long tail’

You’ll pardon a little end-of-the-day marveling at the crazy day we just finished. Here are Ourmedia’s referral logs from Monday:

10,000 hits via slashdot today
1,020 from instapundit (a friend)
965 from gizmodo
268 from boingboing
220 from my blog
132 from deli.cio.us
125 from scripting
100 from seth godin

And that’s with the site down most of the day.

Ourmedia is also the No. 4 news story of the day on Daypop (Yahoo acquiring Flickr was No. 1.)

More interesting, though, is this assessment from the ahead-of-his-time Seth Godin, which (with due apologies) I’ve got to reprint in full:

End of discussion

A lot of us have been talking about this day for a very long time, but it appears to be here.

The end of FCC controlled content
The real beginning of the pro-am content revolution
The final straw for ad-supported media
and
The nail in the coffin for businesses that need selfish advertising to succeed.

Yep, that sounds like a lot of hype, but check out:

Link: Ourmedia Homepage | Ourmedia.

It is now supercheap to serve up media
It is also supercheap to make music and video and text
and
the big guys can’t afford to make good stuff any more, so it’s all reality TV and recycled music anyway.

What Ourmedia does is power the long tail.

There needs to be money in the system, imho, not to pay for it (as this site shows) but to serve as an editor and an arbiter and an assigner of value. In the meantime, if you’re basing your success on the three local TV network model of the universe, this is worth a look.

(Sumner Redstone’s daughter is the new heir apparent of Viacom. The question is: will she inherit anything at all?)

Is Seth a new media godhead or what?

Meantime, my pardner Marc Canter told me by phone from Scottsdale, AZ, tonight that a few members of the PC Forum audience were under the mistaken impression that Ourmedia is somehow in competition with Dan Gillmor‘s Grassroots Media Inc.

That’s not only wrong, it’s exactly the opposite of what Dan’s efforts and ours hope to achieve.

First off, Dan is a member of the Ourmedia Advisory Board.

Second, Dan and I are spearheading a Citizens media retreat in mid-May in San Francisco, which may be held in part at his offices. We’re in constant contact.

But most importantly, Dan is still working out a business plan for his for-profit citizens journalism project. Dan hasn’t discussed his plans — it may involve a web site, it may involve a television network, for all I know — but we do know this: There is plenty of room on the Internet for grassroots media efforts. This space won’t be controlled by the grassroots equivalents of Microsoft, Google and AOL divvying up the citizens mediasphere.

The days of the giants is nearing an end.

Months from now, Ourmedia.org will evolve from a destination website to an open registry — a network of likeminded grassroots sites that freely share personal media with a global audience.

We expect Dan’s new effort will plug into that network.

So, no, Ourmedia isn’t about to compete with Dan’s or any other citizens media effort. We are, however, out to serve as the glue that bonds many of these efforts together.

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.