Global Libraries and open source infrastructure
Great article in Slate by Paul Boutin on Brewster Kahle called The Archivist. It mentions ourmedia.org. We’re proud to be associated with Brewster. As JD and I have gone around and explained ourmedia.org to folks, the #1 question we get back is: “and who is this guy Brewster? Free - forever? Yah - right!”
So from now on - I’ll just point them at this and many other articles on Brewster and the Internet Archive. Currently we’re little more than a better front-end and community to the IA. We’ve got lots of work done on attaching meta-data to media, but until we get open APIs - like Fickr’s - we ain’t done yet.
Collections, ratings, better tags - we’ve got our work cut out for us. But we’ll also be getting new kinds of services integrated - like the Jon Udell/Doug Kaye clipping service lick. Or Bittorrent support.
Who knows - maybe even Orb or Brightcove support.
ourmedia.org will be infrastructure for anyone to build on top of. They’ll be full source-code implementations available so we’re hoping for all sorts of ‘white-labeled’ ourmedia’s. We use a system called Drupal - and this is what it’s all about. Building reference designs so others can take it and run with it.
Maybe even some major high-end media tool company will build a protoype tool with it.
Or maybe Clay Shirky wil require all his students to get ’situated’ with it. In an afternoon.