Ourmedia turns 2

Two years ago today Marc Canter and I launched Ourmedia.org: The global home for grassroots media. Couldn’t have done it without the support of Brewster Kahle and the crew at the Internet Archive. (Marc dropped out of the project in August 2005 to go on to other things, like People Aggregator).

We were the first site to offer people an easy, free way to share their videos, audio works and other digital media with a global audience.

It’s been a wild ride. Today we hit 130,000 members. (Join up – it’s free.)

Next week we’re aiming to relaunch the site with an Ourmedia 2.0. We’ve been busily working with our partners, the development team at Outhink Media, to present a site that caters to the creative community, especially video producers and podcasters.

We’ll be upgrading to the latest version of the Drupal content management system (version 5.1), which offers some cool new features. And we’re building some of our own, in addition to improving the site’s performance and fixing the glitches that have bogged us down for some time. We’ll also have a new look.

At last count there were 367 video hosting sites that followed us, plus a few dozen podcasting services. Here’s how we’re different from all of them (and quite different from YouTube).

Hang on to your hats, you’ll soon be participating in a new site that will put users at the control switch.
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.