The Internet has created a new medium for many artists to share their creative works, but finding art, photos and other handiworks online often leads to a hodgepodge of results and many artists aren't putting their work online at all.
A group of Web and tech pioneers are hoping to change that and have launched an ambitious open-source project called Ourmedia.org. The online site is designed to provide a free digital showcase to help artists and other creative types share their digital works -- including MP3s of music, audio files, digital animation, pictures and writings -- online. Works will be hosted forever at no cost to the artists, according to the site's organizers, as long as posters agree to share their creations worldwide. The site's founders hope amateurs and professionals alike will post their work on the site to create a large, searchable digital archive. Think of it as a digital museum featuring everything from audio recordings of poetry to nature pictures and MP3s.
It's a noble and large undertaking. If it works, it could give artists a larger reach than they might have otherwise had with their own Web sites or by keeping their work on display only in the offline world (or stuck in their computer hard drives).
Artists interested in posting things to the site have a set of rules to follow to show off their works for free (including options of tailoring a copyright for sharing their work). There are no private storage options on the site -- hosting is offered if artists agree to share their creative works for all to see. Only porn and items copyrighted by someone else can't be posted, The Associated Press explained in its coverage. The Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit behind its own digital library, is providing free storage space for the project. The site, which is run by volunteers, is in alpha form and its organizers say a beta version is next before a finished Web site.
Other partners include Bryght (which is hosting the site for free), Creative Commons and Wikipedia, which OurMedia said on its site all share "a vision that compelling grassroots works --now scattered across the Web or hidden away on laptops and closed networks -- deserve a wider audience."
The group has an impressive advisory board, made up of Internet scholars and other experts, including Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who is behind the Creative Commons copyright project. Former San Jose Mercury News tech scribe Dan Gillmor, who is promoting grassroots journalism in his new venture, is also on the board.
Ourmedia was co-founded by writer J.D. Lasica and techie Marc Canter,, who believe Ourmedia.org "could become a cultural archive for researchers and future generations of Internet users that want to view history through an alternative media lens," The San Jose Mercury News said. "The idea for the site, Lasica said, came to him while attending a digital storytelling conference in Sedona, Ariz. 'Here was this new storytelling form, and it needed an audience,' Lasica said. Grassroots media has enjoyed an explosion of interest in the past year, fueled by the increased credibility of bloggers and the growing popularity of video and audio tools such as camcorders and editing software. content is proliferating. A video blogging Internet discussion board -- which had only about 50 members in December -- now has about 5,500. On the audio side, a new trend called podcasting has spawned thousands of amateur Internet radio shows," the paper said.
eWeek's Chris Nolan described Ourmedia this way: "Think of it as blogging with video and audio, only a little better organized than the mishmash of (mostly text-only) sites up today. On one level, OurMedia is a community site, the sort of thing that a Hollywood studio person or a talented recording engineer might dismiss as amateurish. But think about what it's going to look like when someone really creative gets their hands around a digital camera or an MP3 player and then distributes their work to that community. Think about what a filmmaker rejected by the studios or other established outlets might do with OurMedia's savvy audience."
The site already has a great collection of audio files, artwork and other creative works worth browsing. Creativity, of course, has no limits. A sampling of some interesting works on the site already: There's a posting for law buffs of oral arguments from the Supreme Court's Miranda V. Arizona 1966 case and a link to text of Grimm's Fairy Tales, added from the Gutenberg Collection. There's also the less historic, but equally interesting postings of an MP3 by well-known musician David Byrne featuring his song "My Fair Lady," a stormy Memphis moon picture and the mundane -- a video clip of a high school dragon boat race.
Art is definitely in the eye of the beholder, but that is what makes this project so fascinating and worthwhile.
As The Blog Turns
The advertising world is eyeing the blogosphere, and vice-versa. More bloggers are looking for ways to make money off their sites (I have not added advertisements yet to mine, but may plan to soon). The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the trend in an article today, noting that "advertising on Web sites was a $9.6 billion business in the U.S. last year, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau there is little data to date on blog ad-spending. Blogads.com, a service that matches bloggers and advertisers, says its business has grown from 28 ads in September 2002 to 1,685 ads last month. The vast majority of the 8 million or so blogs currently in existence have few if any ads. Many are run by hobbyists or armchair commentators, some of whom sign up to carry tiny text ads from a large pool of advertisers through a service from Google Inc. The ads generate revenue only when a visitor clicks on the ad. Most bloggers, like Ronni Bennett, a former television producer who lives in New York's Greenwich Village and writes about aging on timegoesby.net, can't even offset the cost of her Internet access. Her site gets between 1,200 and 1,500 page views a day, bringing in all of $50 since December 2004."
Meet The Latest Podcaster
Politico John Edwards is the latest to throw a hat into the podcasting ring, posting a 25-minute podcast to his Web site . He chats about college basketball, political issues and breast cancer, to name a few topics. Does this mean podcasting is going to be to the next election cycle what blogs were for the last: A must-have for any politician worth paying attention to? I think so. For politicians, they are now discovering podcasts are a great tool to show off that they are tech-savvy, or they can at least pretend to be (more likely: their Webmasters and handlers are doing a good job on making sure they are up on the latest trends). "Edwards, who is running a poverty center at the University of North Carolina and is believed to be pondering another run for the White House, wasn't known for his tech savvy during his 2004 campaign. But he is now one of the few politicians to venture into the world of podcasting. It is populated, mostly, by otherwise anonymous individuals who have posted recordings of themselves discussing everything from God to wine," The Washington Post said of his foray in podcasting.
The BBC has a primer of sorts on podcasting, makin it one of a slew of publications to offer a gee-whiz take on podcasting.
iPod, File Sharing Tool
iPods spawned podcasting and the digital music and audio players are also being used by music fans to swap MP3s and other files. The Pew Internet & American Life Project's latest study on music downloading found that roughly 19 percent of downloaders, or 7 million adults say they have "downloaded files from someone else's iPod or MP3 player, " TechWeb said. "While we don't know what percentage of these files are authorized or not, simply to know that downloaders are getting files from a wider array of sources than peer-to-peer and paid sources is an important point," said Pew's Mary Madden.
A Supreme File-Sharing Debate
In other file-sharing news, some independent artists are watching a file-sharing case very closely that the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to take up next week. For many independent musicians and labels, file-sharing has helped create buzz for acts that might have otherwise stayed in the underground. "A number of mostly independent recording artists and labels have experimented with and embraced the freewheeling digital distribution that the Internet affords. And many worry that a victory by major recording companies" in the Supreme Court case "could short-circuit the very technologies that they believe are making a more level playing field of the music business." While some big-name musicians like the Dixie Chicks and Sheryl Crow are in the same camp as the RIAA and record labels and against Grokster and StreamCast profiting from downloads, "some artists, including Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, see an upside to file-sharing," the AP reported. "I look at it as a library. I look at it as our version of the radio," Tweedy told the wire service. "It's a place where basically we can encourage fans to be fans and not feel like they're being exploited, which is basically what the whole industry is geared to do."
Great Wall of Dell
Dell Inc. is expanding its operations in China in an effort to supply PCs to a growing and populous market in Asia. It will build its "second manufacturing plant in Xiamen, China, doubling its capacity to make personal computers for mainland China, Hong Kong and Japan," The Wall Street Journal reported.
Dell is also releasing some new PC servers.
Yahoo Goes To Court
Internet company Yahoo wants the U.S. Constitution to protect its operations from coming under fire abroad. The company "asked a federal appeals court Thursday for legal protection for U.S.-based Internet portals whose content is protected by the 1st Amendment, but is illegal in foreign countries. Some of the judges acknowledged the need for a shield for American companies in such situations, but suggested it was premature in the case of Yahoo, which is challenging a fine levied by a Paris court four years ago for allowing the site's French users to buy and sell Nazi memorabilia, in violation of French law," The AP reported. The case "could have broad implications on how Internet companies do business internationally," Reuters noted.
Interesting article on Ourmedia - thanks. I went ahead and signed up to try it out (which means two sign-ups, the other to The Internet Archive) and browsed a bit. Looks like a lot of info has to be entered when media is uploaded, but some might be optional - I need to play a bit and see how it works. One concern I have is that there are already too many sites out there wanting my digital media - store it, sort it, provide various access types, order prints on-line. Generating revenue via prints, or advertising slots, or selling the demographic info. I understand the concept to move past just image storage to an interactive community, I'm not sure how this will pull in the masses caught up in the digital camera revolution.
Posted by: Mike | 2005.03.26 at 01:19 PM