Future Entertainment And New Talent May Soon Indeed Come From The Roots.

I am about to launch a new free entertainment and video-driven music online service. The new site, which will launch in beta next week, is all about music videos, having fun, laughing and grassroots participation.


Photo credit: Javiera de Aguirre

Though I don't want to reveal the specific theme of this new unique new site I have been working on for the last three months, I am here to describe some of the traits that will make it so special.

Dedicated to music, in all of its formats and styles, the new service will give the opportunity of five minutes of personal glory to anyone with some talent and lungs.

This initiative I am about to launch is all about generating user-created content that has unique value and which could show how, while having fun you can indeed create a flywheel that produces free entertainment, creative user-contributions and further explores the venues for mashups, re-mixing and re-use of existing content in new ways.

Here are some of the key traits of this new crazy idea I am about to launch:

Photo credit: Jeremiah Dvorak

a) This is the first incarnation of a new kind of grassroots service, in which individuals have fun by publishing and sharing their talent in a completely new format.

b) All of the content published is under a Creative Commons license which allows its full re-use and re-distribution, in any format and fashion and even for commercial re-use.

c) User participants need not to pay anything, nor they need to sign-up or register if they want to be simple spectators of this showcase.

d) There are no limits to the amount of free physical storage space and bandwidth that will be made available to those viewing or contributing to this showcase.

e) The new service is fully web-based and it works across computers and operating systems of all kinds. It does not require the installation of any plug-in or software on end-users computers.

f) RSS is fully integrated, and the site generates feeds for each one of its categories as well as for dynamic searches. As a matter of fact the site generates multiple full video podcast feeds that can be viewed with most aggregators/media players that support multiple video formats (not iTunes as it supports only Quicktime clips).

g) A user-driven tag-based folksonomy feature, compatible with Technorati/Del.icio.us is fully integrated.

h) A full search facility allows you to find things in a snap.

i) The site costs are supported by contextual, non-intrusive content-relevant ads. No banners, no pop-ups, no spyware.

l) Video clips in the standard QuickTime and Windows Media Video formats are fuly supported.

This new site has been realized with the help of Riccardo Gemma, my senior Information Designer who has worked with me to define the overall "look and feel", and of Gregor Odlazek, who has been working on the technical side where he has created a full archiving and republishing multimedia system nonetheless the very adverse and rapidly changing conditions that I had him work under.

The technical hardware infrastructure underneath this new baby manages massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth for which, unless I would have opted for using Ourmedia.org, I would have not enough of a budget to support the related costs.

Happily, and thanks to another grassroots initiative (TheWeblogProject) I have been carrying forward since March of this year, a great infrastructure support partner has found me and offered its assets, including unlimited storage and bandwidth to power this new musical extravaganza. The partner's name is Top-IX, an Italian internet exchange consortium which works to promote and facilitate the adoption and intelligent use of broadband in the Italian North-West Piedmont region for all kinds of applications.

Top-IX has been also the promoter and organizer of an interesting conference that has taken place last Wednesday in Turin, and in which I have had the honor to moderate multiple media voices from the Italian panorama as well as to interview live Rafat Ali in California, with some close shots about broadband and the economic opportunities it may bring to traditional media.

If you want to be among the early beta testers and reviewers, just place a comment here below using the email address that you want me to contact you at, next week when I open up the doors for the first public testing.

And can you guess what is this all going to be about?