JD Lasica and Marc Canter have announced the launch of their Open Media project for which I would like to provide all of my support.

Open Media wants to provide easy and free access to multimedia authors of all kinds to upload, share, syndicate, remix and publish their own audio/video content.

Here is the official statement from JD Lasica:

"We are in the midst of the greatest boon in grassroots creativity in ages.

Tools once available only to a professional elite are now being taken up by everyday citizens. Just as weblogs brought millions of people into the media ecosystem, so too are new tools empowering individuals to create video, audio, playlists, and other works of personal media and to share them with a global audience.

The personal media revolution is turning visual.

Digital stories, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, fan films, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films — all kinds of short multimedia works have begun to flower.

Alas, the most compelling ones are scattered across the Web or hidden away on thousands of PCs, laptops and closed networks. These works deserve a wider audience.

Open-Media.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video).

Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action.

Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative.

Open Media is three things in one:

• an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop;

• a destination Web site, to launch soon at www.open-media.org;

• eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, and semi-professional visual works licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Unlike other initiatives that are pure-play stand-alone Web sites, Open Media's vision is to bring personal media to millions of desktops through playlists, video jukeboxes, visual albums, and built-in media libraries.


Open-Media.org will serve as a central resource to bring grassroots video under one umbrella; it will serve as a learning toolkit on how to create rich and compelling works; it will serve as a community space; and it will serve as an archive so that these works are preserved for the ages.


For those who grant permission, it will also serve as a clearinghouse that allows others to search for video, download it, and reuse or remix it, with proper attribution.

Supporting this project are thought leaders in the creative community, technologists, educators, and digital-preservation librarians.

Rather than relying on a paid staff, the goal is to build a do-it-yourself platform that lets users anywhere in the world upload material, download shareable media, rank their favorite works, and offer commentary and tutorials. All for free."

If you're interested in joining the project, let them know.

Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive is supporting this project with free storage and bandwidth.