Lessons learned from ourmedia.org
Pleasonton based ourmedia has turned one year old. Dam! Who built that? Who made sure it could happen? Whatever happened to the APIs, schemas, open source user interfaces and leadership that was promised? Somebody is having fun doing junkets, attending conferences, giving the ‘digital community blah blah blah’ rap, having a title to tought - but how is this .org gonna stay alive? And grow? And what does grow mean?
Here are the hard lessons I learned from my experiences with ourmedia.org.
1. Titles need to have capital letters as the first letter of their name. Beware of anybody who insists that the first letter of a title NOT be capitalized. Its a sign of future misteps.
2. You can never rely upon volunteer labor. If you want something built - you gotta pay for it. Period.
3. Federated IDs are the way to go. ourmedia requires that you also register at the Internet Archive. Ugh. We should have figured out a way to get those two systems to work together - in the background. It would have cost us mor emoney - but x10 the uptake.
4. Yes Dear - YouTube started at about the same time. Compare success rates. Growth. Uptake? How are these two sites different? What did ourmedia do wrong?
5. Also beware of people who talk allot about citizen’s media, new kinds of communities and digital community anything. Check up on what code they’ve written, what UIs they’ve developed and maintained and their management skill levels. This will help you ascertain if you wanna invest a lot of time and money into their person and whether you can trust them.
6. Make sure to make it clear what you expect from investing almost $100,000 into something. I sure as hell thought we’d get credit, thanks and plugs. But I guess not.
So congrats to ourmedia.org that Brewster hasn’t pulled the plug yet. I’d sure as hell like to know how you’re gonna keep that ‘YouTube’ crap - out.
March 24th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Other potential factors?
1. .org instead of .com (yes both work, but extra level of confusion)
2. too many links on home page - i don’t know where to begin
3. youtube’s ui focuses on the videos. ourmedia focuses on the users. at the end of the day, why do people come to the site - for the users or the videos?
4. youtube looks like google, so it has a inherit level of trust. ourmedia looks like… um… a hodgepodge of web sites brought into one.
5. youtube uses flash to show videos. ourmedia uses… a hodgepodge of players, along with activex warnings in the latest IE.
6. youtube encourages users to host their videos on their blogs, myspace, etc. ourmedia… um… no?
March 24th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
7. Does having a comb-over indicate a tendency to lie and obfuscate? Someone needs to do a study on this.
March 25th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Happy birthday guys! I’ve been a big fan of what you’re doing since I first came across the site. Running a digital media start-up isn’t easy. Just look at the most recent Loudeye 10-K for proof of that. Audible is making money now but that’s after 10 years of grinding it out.
Anyway, the biggest factors in YouTube’s success has been it’s super-easy to use technology and its acceptance of copyright material. The latter could be their downfall although time will tell. The former is an advantage of YouTube over OurMedia (;)). A system has to be really easy to use in order to achieve the mass adoption that YouTube has. When I’ve used OurMedia it’s been more difficult to post media. I hope that’s constructive to hear that. In no way am I trying to be negative herre toward what you have created.
The bottom line is that it isn’t easy but we’re pushing the world forward. I’m hoping that services OurMedia, YouTube and LearnOutLoud ultimately succeed in spades because we’ll be able to change the face of media consumption forever. And that’s definitely worth all the work.
March 27th, 2006 at 5:53 am
Finding good stuff is really difficult: editors’ work is fundamental, the “most popular” media list was too generic (but at last it gave some information) but, most of all, I think that user ratings are badly needed.
August 27th, 2006 at 5:07 am
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