I spent Monday in Southern California at a strategy session organized by developer/videoblogger Markus Sandy at his house in Ojai. About eight of us, plus another eight developers in a Flash meeting, charted out the next phase of Ourmedia — stage 2 of the personal media revolution.
Among the items on tap in the next few months:
• Social media: We want to introduce such features as playlists, tagging, ratings, rankings and more robust group functionalities. Ourmedia has always been about personal media; now we need to become a true community site by turning personal media into social media — a shared experience.
• Learning Center: We’ve just launched the outlines of a digital media learning center — but we could use your help. We want this to be the hub for learning how to create and share all kinds of personal media: videoblogs, podcasts, digital storytelling, digital photography, games, oral histories, digital music and more. We’ll be sharing the contents of our learning library with other sites, such as Wikipedia.
• Remix Center: We’ll be developing our own toolset, as well as partnering with others (hopefully Dabble), to create a suite of tools that let our members access freely available content and commercially llicensed music to use in mash-up videos, audio works and photos.
• Dynamic front page: We’ve been wanting for some time to move to a model in which the community decides which media items display on the front page, through member rankings. A redesigned user interface will change the contents of the front page several times an hour.
• Window to the world: We want Ourmedia to be not just a walled-garden destination website but a window to many grassroots media repositories.
• Open source: To fulfill this vision, we need to find more developers who are willing to get involved in this open source project.
Longer term, we’re still committed to improved search, open standards, an open registry to make sharing and accessing multimedia easier, and to working with others on a distributed commercial marketplace to let artists earn money from their long-tail works.
We need coders, designers, moderators and other volunteers to take our nonprofit open media project to the next level. Who wants to help?
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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