If you want proof that grassroots media is exploding, you need look no further than podcasts. With built-in computer microphones or inexpensive higher-quality gear, broadband internet connections, and portable listening devices, thousands of people are becoming their own radio talk show hosts and DJs.
But podcasts are just the tip of the iceberg. Grassroots media is not just about someone with a mike and a cup of coffee. It's about social connections. The key to understanding Flickr's meteoric growth is to realize that it started out as social networking software and grew into photography.
"Sharing will be everywhere. It's the next chapter of the World Wide Web," Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner is quoted in a recent New York Times article.
As J.D. Lasica, cofounder with technologist Marc Canter of Ourmedia.org, explains in this interview, "Sharing is what you do with media." And so a whole generation--and to a lesser degree, their tech-enthralled elders--are documenting their lives with digital video, audio, and photography and sharing it via peer-to-peer networks, social networking, and public media sites like Ourmedia.
Ourmedia went public alpha on March 21, with the support of the founders, the Internet Archive for storage and bandwidth, and Creative Commons for licensing solutions. A nonprofit is in the process of being created.
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As J.D. notes, broadcast venues are starting to take notice. A San Francisco radio station is switching to an all-podcast format and Al Gore's Current TV network is looking for youth-created content. The promise of the digital, online world isn't in downloading copyrighted files, it's in creating an ecology where people create, share, remix, and distribute original content--perhaps not to millions, perhaps only to dozens.
But high-flown talk is one thing. What's actually on Ourmedia? The day I did this interview with J.D., the featured video was a long and extremely boring video of Paris Hilton and her fiancé walking to a club and back to their limo. Which doesn't say much for breaking out of the media's control of our consciousness. But on the other hand, Ourmedia isn't necessarily a consumption channel, but potentially a place for raw material for remixes. And Paris is rich for remixing.
I was, however, intrigued with this video of kids doing dangerous jumping tricks. And I was thrilled to find dozens of well-produced videos of Third World activists talking about the impact of the G8 on indigenous peoples. A producer for raisingvoices.org explained: "We work a lot with communities and film and we've found it really difficult to distribute video in an accessible way. The clips you see on Ourmedia came mainly from activists on the ground in Brazil, South Africa, and India. These are people who are deeply engaged with local struggles but with little resources and power to connect with mainstream media, even though they have an enormous wealth of knowledge and experiences to share. Ourmedia makes it possible to get these voices direct to a global community, unfiltered and uncensored. It's a really amazing thing, and such a powerful tool. We love Ourmedia and are so happy to have found it. We'll be using it in the future for all sorts of activist work, getting voices of people who are unheard out there for people to listen to directly."
Richard Koman: What's happened with Ourmedia since the launch on March 21?
J.D. Lasica: The idea for Ourmedia crystallized at the SuperNova conference a year ago. After a few false starts, we finally got our act together and launched the site. We were immediately overwhelmed. The first day the server crashed because we had so many visitors--many more than we expected. I think we had over 100,000 people the first week. We're up to 24,000 members. They've uploaded close to 10,000 media items since launch. The majority has been video. We also have a lot of audio and photographs.
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Koman: It's interesting that it's mostly video.
Lasica: Yeah, I was expecting more photographs. I think most people are uploading video because there's no other place for them to do that. We offer free storage and free bandwidth and we archive your work forever, so presumably your grandkids will be able to see your great video works.
Koman: That's the connection with the Internet Archive. Can you talk about your relationship with them?
Lasica: We have a couple of major partners. One is Creative Commons and one is the Internet Archive. The media items our members upload are actually being served on the Internet Archive servers, either in San Francisco or Amsterdam. Until recently, it's been largely a text affair; they've been wanting to get more into multimedia, since that's where the entire Web is heading. We decided to work with them and open up their mandate by encompassing the new video works, so it's not just stuff that's in the public domain, stuff that's from before 1921, but also contemporary stuff that people are interested in today.
That's why we're working with Creative Commons. Whenever someone uploads a piece to Ourmedia, they have to assign rights to it, and we encourage them to take out a Creative Commons license so other people know exactly what they can do with it.
Koman: Licensing gets kind of complicated when it gets past personal use. I was reading on the wiki that--it seems like there are concerns that Creative Commons licenses don't cover enough uses, such as commercial applications. Can you talk about your thoughts on licensing?
Lasica: First of all, we allow a full range of rights. You can donate your work to the public domain, you can retain full copyright, you can choose a GPL license, or one of eight Creative Commons licenses. They cover most of the things that people want to do with their media. Our default is a Creative Commons noncommercial, attribution, share-alike license, so that people can download a piece of video and share it with their friends, and not sell it but rework it in some way and then share it on the Web.
The majority of people do assign Creative Commons licenses. So that's an encouraging thing, and very soon people will be able to search and sort by licenses so they'll know exactly which movies on the site they can download and rework and create a new work from. So that's really exciting.
There are a few cases where we're trying to extend the capabilities of Creative Commons licenses. For example, what if somebody wants to retain the rights to the work, put a Creative Commons license on it, but also say, if you use it for commercial purposes, if you want to put it on a cable network or on a mobile device, then you're free to do that but I want some compensation for that. Right now, there isn't a Creative Commons compensation-to-the-artist license. So I'm talking to some folks about creating something like that and it might fall outside of Creative Commons.
We're really right at the beginning of this whole thing. Probably a couple of years ago nobody was interested in grassroots media, but now the whole field seems to be exploding. There's a lot of interest from mobile device makers and some of the new IP-TV networks.
Koman: Tell me more about this.
Lasica: Without getting to much into specifics, there are a number of tech startups who are getting involved with interactive television, and what they need is content. Where are they going to get that from? They're not going to get it from Hollywood studios, because they're locked into long-term contracts with other networks.
So they have to look outside, and they're looking at sites like Ourmedia and seeing the sort of short-term video that's being created. Current TV is launching in August and we're talking with them about putting some stuff on their network. They're interested in short-form, youth-oriented video works.
One concern is that anybody who puts something up on the network like Current, they have to own all the rights to work. If you have some home video and you mixed in some music, you have to clear those rights. That's going to be a problem if you have any kind of copyrighted material in your work. Ourmedia is in a little bit of a different game, because we allow a liberal definition of fair use and we're letting people decide where that line ought to be drawn. Since we're a nonprofit and nobody's making any money on the site, we're letting people experiment a little bit.
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Koman: So you feel comfortable with any kind of legal risk that might expose you to?
Lasica: We have drawn some lines. There's something on the site called Neighborhood Watch, and we have a team of 30 moderators around the world in 10 different countries who look at every single work that's uploaded to the site, after the fact. There's no gatekeeper; you publish something to Ourmedia and its live within hours, so we've removed about 30 to 40 media items since launch.
People who just take a piece of copyrighted music and decide they'd like to see that online or they videotape a television program and decide that's fair use, but it really isn't. They do need to have some kind of rights or they need to create some new transformative work in the progress. If they do take 15 seconds of a copyrighted song for an original movie they've created ... again, if it's done for creative purposes, we don't see that that's going to be a big problem. But we do draw the line against copyright infringement. The Star Wars III trailer was the first thing somebody uploaded and the first thing we took down.
Koman: As a nonprofit, this has to be a huge volunteer effort, right?
Lasica: We've been calling this, from the beginning, an open source media project. We basically modeled ourselves after the open source software movement in a lot of ways. Every single piece of code that people write for our site is GPL'd; it's open source. We started on the DRUPL open source platform. All the new stuff we've been building on top of that we're releasing on SourceForge. About 90 percent of the project has been done on a voluntary basis, so the entire design has been done that way; all the moderation has been done and continues to be done on a voluntary basis. A lot of the coding that went into it was done by volunteers.
Finally, though, to push us over the goal line, we had to hire a small team of programmers in New Delhi that my partner Marc Canter is paying for out of his pocket. They're doing a lot of the work of the upgrades to the site and looking into what's wrong when someone uploads content but it doesn't appear on the site.
The Archive really wasn't built to handle this kind of instantaneous hosting of media files; they're a long-term storage repository. So we've had to work with them to sort of reconfigure their servers. The Archive in some sense is taking on a new mission here; they're reinventing themselves. We need to have people who are working with them constantly ... there are a thousand things that could go wrong in any kind of upload of process. When you're handling any kind of media from anybody anywhere in the world and then saying we're going to store your stuff forever and give you free bandwidth, there's a lot that goes into that.
Author's note: Brewster Kahle, director of the Archive adds: "The Internet Archive has recently revamped its upload system to accommodate the video blogging and citizen journalist communities. Working with the developers of the Creative Commons Publisher and Ourmedia, which has adapted CC's technology, the Archive is testing this new system, which has a smoother experience. With the rapid growth in this area, we expect all the open technologies to mature a great deal in the next year."
Koman: When I talked to Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Flickr, he said there are lots of surprising applications that come out of the community building. Where you might have thought that people would only share photos for friends and family, most people actually just share publicly. And there's an effect that comes out of that; you have this huge database of stuff that you can program against. There's some interesting social collections that come out of the groups. People are starting to create content with the forethought of it going on Flickr in one group or another. How do you think social behavior is being impacted by online sharing of media?
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Lasica: A couple of things; specifically, as far as Flickr is concerned. We are approaching Yahoo and asking them to open Flickr's APIs, so that Ourmedia or any site can tap into them and use them in the same way that Flickr is doing. Some of the folks at Yahoo have been really open about promulgating the idea of open source so this is a really great way to prove it in the multimedia world.
I just wrote a book called Darknet: Hollywood's War Against Digital Generation. The whole idea behind that is to explain the personal media revolution and some of the conflicts between that and Hollywood and Big Entertainment, trying to hold back some of what's happening in this sphere. The thing that's really happening is that personal media is becoming social media. The kind of stuff we're creating with photographs, with video, with podcasts, we don't want to just have this stuff stored on our home computers. We want to share it with our friends or with a wider circle of colleagues or even strangers. Because that's what you do with media. Media is there to be shared.
That was the whole reason for creating Ourmedia in the first place. We saw that the tools for creating these personal media forms have been getting easier to use, less expensive, more pervasive. But we saw that there wasn't really a place to share this media with a global audience; that's what we wanted to enable. What you're seeing with Flickr and what you're going to be seeing with Ourmedia and other sites is media as sort of a social experience, so the folksonomies that come with tagging every single piece of media are going to create interesting new ways for people to move through media. Instead of a linear fashion of organized taxonomies and ontologies, people are just going to be able to decide on their own how to organize this media and how to attach new meanings to video and audio and photos and all the rest. So it's really kind of exciting to see how this has taken off on its own.
Koman: It's not that long ago that it would have been thought strange to share personal media with the world. The defaults have been towards privacy and limits, and this seems like a switch. Just change the defaults and a whole range of unexpected things could happen.
Lasica: Yeah, I think that's true but especially among young people and the more tech-savvy crowd, since the advent of Napster, they've seen the internet not just as a communications or information retrieval medium, but as a social medium that engenders community. It's a community space. The longer you spend online and the more you've used P2P networks, the more you experience media as something to be shared, to be used in a group fashion.
Koman: Do you think this will impact what you could call traditional creativity? Do you think what's happening could change what it means to make a movie, for example?
Lasica: For sure. For decades, there's been one rule of moviemaking. You go out there with a whole crew of people and shoot a movie, and then there's a months-long process of editing and distribution. All of that is being exploded out of the water now. Anybody who wants to be a filmmaker, all they need to is grab their camcorder, go out there into the world and create their own vision and put it up on the Web. It doesn't have to be linear; it can be a shared experience, it can be a group of people getting together to create something.
All the rules are off. And we're seeing interesting new forms ... I don't even call them movies or film anymore. Basically it's video--whether you're doing it for television or theatrical release or on the Web, eventually it comes down to pixels on the screen. It could be a video blog, it could be a digital story, or some other sort of independent film. We're seeing all these different forms being uploaded to Ourmedia.
Koman: You know, there's this Coppola quote from when he was making Apocalypse Now, where he envisions that video cameras would allow a million filmmakers to bloom. But from then to now, we've seen America's Funniest Home Videos, but we haven't seen, you know, quality stuff. So I guess I have a question about quality. Of the vast amount of stuff that will be uploaded, how do you separate the stuff you actually want to look at and stuff that even has any intention of being looked at by people who don't have a personal relationship with it?
Lasica: I guess I would have two answers to that. One is that what you find interesting might not be the same as what I find interesting, so the same kind of laws that apply to the blogosphere apply to the video blogosphere as well. There are going to be home movies and independent productions that do find an audience, but it will be an audience in the dozens or hundreds instead of the millions. And that's fine. The people who create those works are probably going to be happy with that kind of reach, as long as it's the right dozen people.
As far as separating out the cool stuff from the really crappy stuff, we're still at the beginning stages. There are things we're going to be incorporating into Ourmedia in the next couple months that actually address that directly. One is ratings. Everybody who's a member of Ourmedia will be able to vote on every piece of media on the site and rate it from 1 to 5. So on that very fundamental, very crude level, that will immediately allow some things to surface.
There are some aspects of social networking, called Groups, which will be incorporated in the next few weeks. And that will be another way for people to socialize and recommend works that they find on the site. There will be other ways to find stuff, as far as moving through media through social tagging. You know, you're right, it's going to be hard to find really good stuff without some more tools.
Richard Koman is a freelancer writer and editor based in Sonoma County, California. He works on SiliconValleyWatcher, ZDNet blogs, and is a regular contributor to the O'Reilly Network.
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