Ourmedia?

21Mar2005 Filed under: Rant Author: Seth

Forgive me for not jumping up and down for joy or falling all over myself to heap praise upon Ourmedia - (Jeff, Dave, Glenn, Dan, Ed, Seth and Gizmodo among others). I had assumed something like Downhill Battle’s Blog Torrent would reasonably do the exact same thing. Plus, if bittorrent is good enough for Fiona Apple to find an added amount of fame/listenership, why go somewhere else? Blog Torrent lets anyone distribute their media without uploading anything to a web server, save a .torrent file.

“Our media” should be fully distributed using a leader and innovator in P2P software - BitTorrent. Hosting large multimedia files on a web server is so Web 1.0. But maybe I’m missing out on something here. Is Ourmedia about more than just the distribution of large, multimedia content? Is it designed to be something akin to a blog Archive.org or Project Gutenberg?

Help me out here. I’m just not seeing why Ourmedia is such a big deal.

UPDATE: Boris Mann of Bryght sets me straight in the comments. I’m glad to know that Ourmedia will make things easier for users and that it’s built on a solid foundation (Drupal/Archive.org/BitTorrent). Thanks for the knowledge, Boris.

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6 Responses to “Ourmedia?”

Boris Mann
March 21st, 2005 at 7:31 pm

It’s built on Drupal, which is what Downhill Battle is also being built around. It will share in those BitTorrent tools, and allows people who don’t understand BitTorrent to still play along.

Currently the “backend” — where the files actually permanently live IS archive.org. Ourmedia provides a front end that allows more metadata, easier searching, and more interaction.
Seth
March 21st, 2005 at 10:21 pm

Thanks for the info, Boris. I hope I didn’t offend you or any of the Ourmedia folks. I was honestly just curious about the technologies being employed and the upside for users.
Gerry
March 24th, 2005 at 11:54 am

Actually, it looks like they are exploring a distributed framework, including P2P.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/11217605.htm
Seth
March 24th, 2005 at 11:56 am

Thanks for the link, Gerry. I’ve come to a greater understanding of Ourmedia over the last few days by talking to one of it’s developers and doing some more thorough research.
swapo
April 15th, 2005 at 9:08 am

The folks at BlogMatrix have been going down bittorrent road and it appears they have a good workable solution, that’s easy on the user/publisher. They have and integrated bittorrent client in their (blog/audio/video) aggregator Sparks! Check it out http://www.blogmatrix.com
Seth
April 15th, 2005 at 9:17 am

Thanks for the heads up about BlogMatrix, swapo. I appreciate it.