From a day-to-day user’s perspective, perhaps none of these will have any impact for some time. But they all indicate that, in one way or another, the business of free media hosting is a difficult one in which to survive. Flickr’s announcement made it pretty clear that it’s going to stay free for the moment, but as soon as a corporation pays money for a service, they’re going to reach a point where they’ll want a bit of ROI. (Witness Microsoft’s purchase of Hotmail and their (abortive) attempt to sell once-free e-mail back to its own users.)

You’re right, Mike, this is something new. And if they can maintain it, both in the face of escalating cost and attempts to seize/suppress content by law enforcement, then who knows where it might end.

I mean, this is yet another (free or otherwise) place that is offering to store my photos, my thoughts, my words, etc. As if I don’t have enough between by own site, Flickr, Audioscrobbler, delicious, gmail, etc…

At some point it becomes too much to keep track of. As well, I don’t see me moving all of my media there. There are things I don’t want to share, things I’d like to stay mine and services that already do the job just fine. And I’m not too keen on adding another service to my already long list unless it’s very, very compelling to me, which OurMedia isn’t — yet.

Then there is the idea that if all media is free it may drop the value of good media. Not every great artist does it for the love, even if they’ve got a passion, then it’s just another flash in the pan. Realism dictates that money has to become an issue at some point is my guess.

But I don’t know, it’s early and it’s something to watch, no doubt about it. Not sure if I see it as the Web shaker you see though…

It could of course also fail very hard. But even in doing so, it has the potential to be a major catalyst along the way.

I don’t know if I would want to take on that project, but kudos to them.

It could be really cool, or it could be another Friendster with files.

But who knows, it’s way to early to judge either way, but if you’re interested, that something.

seed money: none that I know of! Marc Canter is beating the bushes looking for some more coin to polish the interface etc. etc. OM is planning to register as a non-profit, AFAIK.

The media itself “lives” on the Internet Archive permanently. So it is their storage (Petabytes) and bandwidth (Terabytes) that is being used.

The content vetting/spam issue is going to be a big one.

Storing content everywhere: this is *exactly* the problem we’re facing already. OM isn’t going to be another store. In fact, it’s a front-end to the actual store — archive.org. But the store is reliable and essentially unlimited, and OM wraps some additional metadata and community concepts around the local representation of that piece of media.

Now we have to run desktop/server tools to aggregate all our content back. So it lives out in the cloud, but also is accessible, searchable, and shareable locally.

As for law enforcement…well, let’s just say I currently have a fun project where law enforcement is going to be publishing some fun content through OM, under a CC license no less.

I’d just suggest that having loads of media, much of it uninteresting, is probably a good thing if handled right.

The big question for me is: why would I move my photos, for example, from Flickr, which I thing is great and am willing to pay for simply because it’s easy of use and it’s community features, to OM or archive.org?

I don’t see that draw now…but, I realize it’s early, just thinking out-loud is all. I do wish y’all luck and am very interested to see how it evolves. The community, quality of content and interface would all be important I’d think.

David: That is exactly my concern.

I wish you guys all the best, and I’ll be watching closely. Perhaps the bandwidth and storage situations can eventually work themselves out via a P2P distribution for the most popular content. Then you only have to serve up the tail.

There is likely some sponsor-type items in the works. Gotta fund Marc and JD flying all over the place :P

I have no idea of the constraints of archive.org. For all intents and purposes, “unlimited” is probably a good starting point as far as I can tell.

I have 3000 pictures on Flickr. I am happy to be paying them $5/month for the rest of my life for the entire “experience” of photos there.

I see the strengths of OM as being able to handle the rich media content of audio and video that people just don’t have the bandwidth and storage for today.

With OM perhaps pulling some more/better APIs out of archive.org, we might see some interesting services evolve around it. What happens on the OM site itself is secondary for me, although I’m sure the community will evolve in interesting ways.