Social Media
Part 1: A Conversation with OurMedia Co-Founder, J.D. Lasica
by Christina Pikas, Contributing Editor
Ed. Note: We would like to welcome Christina Pikas, a librarian at the Johns Hopkins University Advanced Physics Lab, to the ResourceShelf/DocuTicker team. She’ll be contributing items from time to time. Christina also has her own blog; it’s linked here.
I recently got the opportunity to interview J.D. Lasica by e-mail and ask him about one of his new projects, OurMedia. Lasica and Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive are making great strides in bringing personal media publishing to the masses. This is one web project in which librarians can make great contributions by assisting in the metadata development and searching and it’s a place where we can publish our media for free. It’s worth having this on your radar as a source of multimedia available for your customers plus you now have a better way to experiment with making presentations and podcasts available to the widest audience.
Christina Pikas/ResourceShelf (RS): Can you tell me a little about yourself and how you became interested in social media?
J.D Lasica (JD): For 20 years I was an ink-stained wretch, working as an editor and reporter at various newspapers, chiefly at the Sacramento Bee. In the mid-’90s, I became entranced by the world of new media and made the leap from print to new media, working in senior management at three dotcoms.
Social media is where we’re headed in the mediasphere. It’s not about an individual or organization delivering content to an audience — it’s about having a genuine dialogue around particular topics. In a world where the audience is now a part of the media equation,
forward-looking media organizations should be looking for ways to engage readers and to bring them into the conversation.
RS: What do you mean by “personal media revolution”?
JD: For decades, media was all about big printing presses or broadcast stations, where an elite corps of professionals brought you the news and the information they deemed important. That’s the way it was.
No longer. The Internet and software tools that have become easy and inexpensive to use have led to a democratic mediasphere where you can reach millions of people through the power of your voice and ideas.
The personal media revolution has leveled the playing field. Stories of public import can now be shaped through voice and talent rather than through one’s pocketbook. We all own A.J. Liebling’s printing presses now. But what will we publish?
RS: Could you briefly introduce your new repository project, OurMedia?
JD: In July 2004 a handful of volunteers began work on a project with a simple proposition: Anyone in the world can publish a work of personal media, and we’ll store it, let you show it off, and give you bandwidth for it — for free, forever.
In March 2005 we launched Ourmedia.org, hewing to that vision of free storage. Some 20,000 people signed up to become members in the first two months. We’re a nonprofit educational community with the goal of helping to enable the grassroots media movement, which is now in full bloom. Members have published thousands of truly astonishing works — home videos, podcasts, student films, independent movies and more.
But our goal is to be more than a mere repository. We plan to roll out a global registry so that Ourmedia serves as the nexus of a global grassroots media movement that any site can enlist in. In a year or two from now, millions of people should be able to summon up works of freely shareable personal media and have them display on their desktops at the click of a mouse — without even knowing where the works actually live. You should be able to call up hundreds of videos or audio files about George W. Bush, or global warming, or the Iraq war, and have them dance on your desktop — and not care about which servers they reside on.
Ourmedia will succeed when we disappear into the fabric of the Internet. Our goal is to go dark.
Part 2 of Christina’s conversation with J.D Lasica is posted on ResourceShelfEXTRA.
