Having been involved with the arts for a number of years, I’ve noticed that while there are a lot of creative types who are perfectly at home making their own websites – and now blogs – there are others who plug along pretty well as if the Internet never happened. I believe a lot of the latter group would love to be able to present their work online but are baffled by the technology.
From what I’ve seen today at the new Ourmedia site, that could all change, and very rapidly.
Ourmedia is an open source, volunteer run project, with serious backing both in money and organizational support, to provide free storage and free bandwidth for videos, audio files, photos, text or software.
This is their invitation: ‘Create. Share. Get noticed. Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. Ourmedia promise to host your media forever – for free.’
And, amazingly for me – it’s ‘Forever. No catches.’
I have to admit that at first glance I thought, uh-oh, another one of these deals where they get a lot of people in free and then you need to ‘upgrade’ to paid membership to get any benefits.
Not so. This is admittedly a site that is not even in Beta, but self-declared Alpha. But the people and organizations involved are evidence that this could be the start of something very big. The advisory board includes some legendary Internet names and people who have an unassailable track record in ‘democtratizing’ online media for the creative community, people like Howard Rheingold and Denise Atchley.
This news item provides some background.
The one thing people have to do who choose to place their creative works on the site is to share.
And part of the news is that anyone who joins gets a free blog as part of the deal. That’s even if you don’t see yourself as a creative person.
I can see that Ourmedia could be a great resource for people whose main blog is for business but every now and again – or often! – want to create a work in text, or audio, or video, that has little or nothing to do with their business. It’s also a resource for people who want to have a more personal blog besides their business blog, but don’t want to have to pay to maintain it.
Creative Types Get New Digital Home at Ourmedia
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