I was listening to a recent interview from ITConversations with Marc Canter and JD Lasica, founders of Ourmedia, where they offered further insight into their goals and frankly, it seems a little too forward thinking.
Ourmedia is a non profit organization, backed by a man who runs internet archive, that aims to create a free global directory (including hosting) of grassroot media of any type. More specifically, they hope to create a "remix culture" where "underground" digital creation of one person would be built upon by another and publicly shared.
Here are some of the interesting questions from the interview and why I disagree with their answer:
Who will police the content to filter out porn or copyright material (though I guess porn is copyrighted material too)?
Their model depends strongly on end users like us to report abusive content and a small group of administrators combing the site. But considering how much data could go through Ourmedia (internet archive grows by 20 terrabytes a month), I think the scope of the problem could be well beyond a group of volunteers. Further, if someone found copyrighted works on the site, what are the chances that they would report it? More than likely, we will find many "underground" and illegal niches hiding among the masses of Ourmedia content.
What type of content are you expecting?
Currently, they allow uploading of text, audio and video but hope to expand it to more interactive content such as software and games. Policing content such as games and software will be even more difficult. Much more time would have to be spent determining what are the actual contents. Further, What is stopping someone from uploading a new virus? What if that virus caused economic damage? Who becomes liable?
When asked what would be among their most difficult challenge, one of the points they raised was to create a site that is professional in presentation and in content. But controlling the content in Ourmedia will equate to controlling user access which in effect would destroy the open community Ourmedia wishes to create. Like they say, you can't have the best of both worlds.
On paper, Ourmedia's idea to revolutionalize the multimedia culture looks quite good but unless everyone is on the same page, it would be quite difficult to accomplish their goals.
On a last and unrelated note, Marc's comment about how ebay, amazon and google are open source because they provide an API is clearly incorrect. If that were true, Microsoft would be among the biggest supporter of open source programming and linux would be robbery.
Tags: [Ourmedia] [podcast] [ITConversations]