Hey! I’m an open media developer!

I guess I should be going.

Oh well. This outfit sure sounds like what JD and I were starting - when we embarked on ourmedia.org a year ago.

Oh well - I guess we were too busy giving away free bandwidth and storage to actually get on with the:

- meta-data standards (though we sure put alot of effort into getting our meta-data right)

- open source user interafces

- open registry of open media servers

- APIs for all!

So what went wrong?

I personally paid for building ourmedia.org (I’m in over $50,000 right now) - Brewster Kahle put up his servers, we leveraged the Creative Commons licenses and made alliances with folks - but the notion of ourmedia.org being a clearing house of media standards - never really took off.

Not with the other founder, not with the press or blogosphere or other developers and not with anyone - but me.

I certainly pitched it enough, had plenty of meetings with so-called ‘research groups’ and well inteneded funders, but it seemed like I was the only guy yelling that we needed open media standards.

Then came along Yahoo’s Media RSS and I said “right on!” We got a whole bunch of meta-data standards - to give you - but “oh well” - that never happened either.

Their progress is great and their ‘rumored’ talks with Apple - to get into sync with Apple’s podcasting ‘derivation’ is encouraging - but the range of meta-data in Media RSS is still pretty ‘limiting’.

We desigend ourmedia.org’s meta-data to take care of all situations, to keep everyone happy, you know - Canter’s Law #1.

So now comes along the Open Media Summit mafia - and I say “right on!’ The last time I was there - there was 2 feet of snow blowing and it was beautiful - Manhatten was desserted.

Anyway if any of you ‘Open Media Summit’ people need open media meta-data - take a look at what ourmedia.org has. If you can find it running.

You see it’s swamped with over 13+M hits a month, almost 50k members and yet is still running on one measly machine (with my guys trying to keep it up with bubble gum and kite string - and oh yah - one brave volunteer sysop named Jeff Kowalski.

Thanks Jeff!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 7:53 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.