Ourmedia.org helped usher in an age of grassroots media … and all that followed
Where were you 20 years ago? For some of us techies, we were just at the doorstep of Web 2.0. And, in fact, it was 20 years ago today that a major milestone was achieved – one that you likely won’t read about anywhere else.
On March 21, 2005, my partner Marc Canter and I launched Ourmedia.org. The site billed itself as an open media platform for grassroots creators, ranging from video producers to musicians to citizen journalists. Its most lasting legacy, however, is that it was the world’s first free video hosting service.
It wasn’t until May 2005 that YouTube launched its private beta. (Yes, kids, there was a time when there was no YouTube.)
I had already been blogging for four years by then, and my post about Ourmedia’s launch is still there at Inside Social Media (it was called New Media Musings back then).
What folks don’t remember is how new all of this was. Video over the Internet in 2005 was about the size of a postage stamp.
You’ll notice that we also called ourselves Ourmedia.org, not .com. Ourmedia was open source and not for profit. We had a decidedly different vision for media than startups like YouTube, founded by two members of the PayPal mafia.
Because bandwidth was so prohibitively expensive back then and high-speed Internet was still a pipe dream, we partnered with the nonprofit Internet Archive for all of our hosting. Our Board of Advisors included such luminaries as Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig, author Howard Rheingold, technologist Doc Searls, philanthropist Mitch Kapor, and others. Dave Toole, who helped support the site, came in just a bit later.
Ourmedia was for all of us. Because we all have stories to share.
2005: The era of revolutionary changes
It was an era when media itself was undergoing revolutionary changes. Podcasting was only a few months old. Flickr had debuted only 13 months before and “tagging” was a new phenomenon. Facebook had also launched 13 months earlier but was still just a site for date-deprived Ivy League college kids. Reddit was still three months away from launching. Twitter wouldn’t arrive for another year, and Chris Messina hadn’t coined the term “hashtag” yet. Steve Jobs was still two years away from holding the first smartphone in his hands at San Francisco’s Moscone Center (I was there to see it).
We all felt the buzz of the creative energy that was taking all forms: video, audio, music, online photography and more. We believed grassroots media would rise up alongside traditional media and lead to a new era of global creativity leading to a wealth of new voices and undiscovered talent.
Our vocabulary was still being created. What to call the folks who contributed media to Ourmedia? Artists? Creators? Producers? It wasn’t until the next year that anyone began using the term “social media”—the idea that once grassroots media became shareable, it took on an entirely new dimension.
A burgeoning wealth of creativity
It was a wild ride to program the home page of Ourmedia each day with new digital stories, video diaries, fan films, Flash animations, citizen journalism—all the kinds of media you’d never see in traditional media (which my colleagues airily dismissed as “legacy media”). For a decade, Ourmedia supported Creative Commons licenses while YouTube did not.
We were in an innovation horserace. I still remember the thrill of being the first site where a user could upload a video and see it go live on the site. It was absolutely magical when that small video popped up on my Firefox Web browser a minute after I uploaded it. At other sites, like YouTube and Blip.tv, you had to wait for an email notification to know your upload was live.
You know the rest of the story. The golden age of grassroots media was shortlived. Web 2.0 disappeared, subsumed by the overpowering maw of the tech giants. YouTube was bleeding hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, but it was saved by a buyout by Google. Ourmedia closed its doors not long after I left in 2007. Social media has now metastasized into something that’s often dark and ugly.
But at the beginning, the dream was beautiful.
Do you remember that era, or has it faded into the history books?
Image at top: The welcome message on the Ourmedia home page on March 21, 2005.
