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Media The Internet

From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life 327

Posted by timothy from the but-then-they'll-have-to-kill-you dept.
powerline22 writes "From the people who gave you the Internet Archive comes Ourmedia, a place for grassroots media to flourish. Upload anything, maybe a video, some pictures, your custom applescript, and it gets hosted for free, for life. Drupal is hosting the site, and the Internet Archive is providing hosting and bandwidth for the files."
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From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life More

From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:05PM (#12003114)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Best usage (Score:5, Funny)

    by stupidfoo ( 836212 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:05PM (#12003117)
    Porn

    Let's be honest here. Your own private permanent porn collection. What could be better?

  • They did this before (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:05PM (#12003119)

    with their caching idea (like coralcache) but 6months later they stopped it, whats to say the same wont happen here ? when people do hosting they want reliability not bandwidth

    • "when people do hosting they want reliability not bandwidth"

      Not necessarily. Hosting like everything else is split among different needs and wants. There are some who will never pay more than $.99 per year for unlimited everything. Then there are those who will pay $100.00 per month for redundant reliable connections. To each their own.

      I have no doubt the service will be around for a while and if they need cash then enter the advertisers. Ads everywhere and then the selling of your personal data.

    • Contrary to what this writeup is saying archive.org has been providing free hosting forever for free for quite a number of years now. I suppose there is no guarentee that anything is forever but they have definitely put their money where their mouth is.

      The freecache project that you refer to was an experiment. It didn't work out, as is often the case with experiments.

  • Yeah baby... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:05PM (#12003123)
    I mean, what's the better way to stress-test their servers than announce it on slashdot.org?

  • How Long? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bleckywelcky ( 518520 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:06PM (#12003125)
    How long can this really last? Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Admins need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.

    • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:15PM (#12003244) Homepage
      Even so, to some extent it does need to be done.

      I'm not saying everything (or even a measurable portion) that appears on the internet is worth keeping forever, but the worth of any of it is not something those in the present are qualified to judge on.

      In a thousand years, provided humanity hasn't wiped itself out by then, the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

      • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Funny)

        by eln ( 21727 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:32PM (#12003440)
        the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

        Good God, I hope not.

      • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Funny)

        by doormat ( 63648 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:42PM (#12003559) Homepage Journal
        In a thousand years, provided humanity hasn't wiped itself out by then, the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

        Yes, because thats what I want to be remembered by, porn, All Your Base..., the star wars kid and NumaNuma. Yea... right...

        • Re:How Long? (Score:2, Funny)

          by Thud457 ( 234763 )
          That's why I contend that when the noosphere does become sentinent, it's going to be bat-shit crazy.

          (Just like humanity.)

        • In five years time, I want people to still be able to get accounts of the Genoa Social Forum raid (July 22, 2001) and other events that are likely to turn out to be historical, but may be covered up in history books.

    • Re:How Long? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:17PM (#12003268) Homepage
      archive.org has been around for quite some time, and they offer no small service. They've obviously secured funding from somewhere.

    • Depends on the economics. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PxM ( 855264 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:17PM (#12003273)
      The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.

      --
      Want a free iPod? [freeipods.com]
      Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. [freegamingsystems.com] (you only need 4 referrals)
      Wired article as proof [wired.com]

    • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ArcticFlood ( 863255 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:26PM (#12003371)
      This page [archive.org] tells how archive.org obtains its funding.
    • Admins need to eat.

      WHAT!?!!? Oh crap, I left them in the glass room for a month with no food!

      Oh Ghod! The UNIX admins tried to eat the MCSA's brain and starved to death.

      Oh the horror! THE HORROR!!!

    • How long can this really last? Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Admins need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.

      How long can open source software really last? Software dev tools cost money. Dev machines cost money. Offices cost money. Developers need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.
      • How long can open source software really last? Software dev tools cost money. Dev machines cost money. Offices cost money. Developers need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.

        Amazing! One of the worst analogies I've ever read! And I've read a lot of bad analogies as a Slashdot regular. Why waste sarcasm in this manner???

        (If I have to explain why, then you shouldn't reproduce.)

    • What I don't understand is why free? I mean I understand why it's better for me, but why not just charge a small fee to keep my data stored for life? I'd certainly pay for it.

  • In the end, lots of homemade stuff (Score:3, Insightful)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:06PM (#12003130) Journal
    Cool, sounds like the perfect place to store Rooftop Warrior [suso.org] [warning, bad quality homemade ninja movie]

  • Uh huh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "For life".

    Think they're going to hold to that?

    And I don't just mean in the case of the 90% of content which will be posted there illegally, or even the 80% of the leftover content which will be highly pornographic. What if I post an MPEG there and it gets linked on fark and winds up eating terrabytes of the site's bandwidth? How long you think it will remain there?
  • wow - thats the one drag and limit to working with video online - bandwidth. this could really open up possibilities for video clips and shows for the people by the people..

    the 'permenant for life' thing seems a little wishful, but we'll see.

  • I bet there isn't a catch! (Score:3, Funny)

    by 93,000 ( 150453 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:07PM (#12003145)
    Things are never too good to be true, especially in the computer world.

  • obl. privacy concern. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:08PM (#12003149)
    all is well and good, until they get bought by someone else. what happens to the data then? what happens if they go bankrupt, and their hard drives wind up on ebay?
  • "I'm sorry. You can't run this site since it hosts material deemed illegal by our hate-speech laws."

    Free speech ain't always pretty.

  • World's Youngest Video Blogger (Score:5, Insightful)

    by filmmaker ( 850359 ) * on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:08PM (#12003153) Homepage
    The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.

    It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.
  • I can't say I have high hopes for how this will be doing in a few months if it's dead already.

  • Which life? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:11PM (#12003203)
    Hopefully "for life" didn't mean the life of their websever, because that was shortened to about 5 minutes after the story was posted. :)

  • Heh (Score:2, Funny)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 )
    The site can't even handle being slashdotted... free video hosting, for life, for everyone?

    Yeah.

    Right.
    • No, see... that's how they manage their costs. They only have a dialup connection for outgoing packets, and an OC3 for uploads. ;-)

  • Mirror (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcguyver ( 589810 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:12PM (#12003216) Homepage
    In case of a slashdotting, here's a mirror of OurMedia on the wayback machine:
    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ourmedia.o rg [archive.org]

    /ironic

  • Already been using it for 9 months (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Radix37 ( 670836 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:13PM (#12003222) Homepage
    At my website... it wouldn't exist at the size it is now without archive.
  • apparently that isn't going to be enough bandwidth. There's one question answered.

  • GREAT for independent musicians (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trolling4Columbine ( 679367 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:16PM (#12003255)
    Now they don't have to buy storage and bandwidth to host their music.

    Not sure what hosting costs your average indy band, but anything that saves them even a few bucks is a boon.
  • The server appears to be hosed. It looks like:

    ourmedia.org resolves to 69.44.153.99.
    69.44.153.99 is part of ServerBeach's netblock [arin.net]

    I guess our only hope is that server isn't a shared one, taking down several other sites with it.
  • Need I say more?
    • ChipMonk wrote:

      TANSTAAFL. Need I say more?

      Expanding the acronym to it's full length might help (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).

      Unlike most acronyms posted on slashdot, this one actually seems to have been coined as a fad and hip bit of slang well before the personal computer. (My origins don't go back much further than that so I can't comment on it's real coinage).

      Of course, this type of language research in the past has been helped by the need for people to write things down in physical for

  • Smells like a cheap ploy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ced_Ex ( 789138 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:22PM (#12003325)
    Given that the site is slashdotted by you hordes, I'm basing from the article posting it seems to me that this could be an easy way to obtain copyrighted material without getting any **AA involvement.

    Here's the plan:

    1. Claim to host multimedia for life.
    2. Open access for users to *upload*
    3. ???
    4. Shut down because of bad business plan.
    5. Reap the rewards!

    Technically you didn't download any files, and by the time *AA comes by, you've shut down and stopped hosting files. (But really we all know you've made those backup copies offline.)

    Am I right, or am I right?

  • Wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @04:25PM (#12003356)
    I see that they are partnered with wikipedia, what exactly is the relationship of this partnership?
  • I just manage my own servers with a vanity domain.

    What? Doesn't everybody?

  • This will go with that free email account that I signed up for four years ago that was suppose to be free for a lifetime....

    Well, it would if the email company hadn't decided to switch to "pay or you lose your address" model a year later.

  • ...after the story appears on Slashdot, how are they going to handle hosting all of those multimedia files?

  • Repeat after me kids.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mabu ( 178417 )
    ..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".

    Somebody pays, always. If not you directly, then you pay indirectly; if not now, then later, but you get nothing for free.

    Perhaps the biggest infection within our society is this notion that you can get something for nothing, and how otherwise seemingly intelligent people turn into brain dead drooling baboons at the thought of getting a freebie.
    • It's strange that since "free" is an impossiblity, that such a word would even exist. I wonder where we got such notion?

      I move to have "free" stricken from all dictionaries. Who's with me?!

    • Re:Repeat after me kids.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nicky_d ( 92174 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @05:03PM (#12003837) Homepage

      ..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".

      That's a mantra for C21st America if ever I heard one. Of course there's such a thing as 'free'. Yeah, someone pays, but if it ain't me, then it's free. If I end up with two copies of a book and I give one away, I've paid for both but the surplus copy is entirely free to whoever I give it to. If I help a friend out with their PC, I pay with my time, but the service is free to them. Things are sometimes done in kindness, or in the service of a better world, even in this day and age. Don't let 'them' convince you otherwise.

      Of course, free iPod schemes are a different matter, and I'd imagine this kind of cynical appeal to the frugally covetous is what you're talking about. But I don't equate archive.org with the architects of those kind of schemes. It IS still possible to get something good and decent for free, and that's something to be thankful for.

    • In this case, one "pays" by providing media to the metaphorical media bank if you're using their hosting service, and you "pay" by giving attention to the media posted there (and therefore directly or indirectly attention to the creator(s) of the media) thus encouraging people who want their media distributed to continue providing more if you are simply downloading media from them.

      Still, I agree with your sentiment. In the USA, we USED to have this thing called "The American Dream", which referred to the

    • ..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".

      Sure there is.

      Somebody pays, always. If not you directly, then you pay indirectly; if not now, then later, but you get nothing for free.

      That's not what 'free' means. 'Free' is something that has a specific context--in the case at hand, the context is monetary payment, of which the service is provided for 'free' (as is Google, slashdot, etc).

      You're talking about causality--specifically that for every effect (say, you get a free hotdog at the mall), there must be a ca

  • nice ! (Score:2, Informative)

    by sla291 ( 757668 )
    It's nice to see that free services like that are flourishing...

    jamendo [jamendo.com] does it too, for CC music albums, and they use bittorrent.
  • Their rules and policies aren't very clear. Much of the media being created for and posted to the web falls into the "gray" areas of copyright--media whose copyright status hasn't been tested in court because the RIAA/MPAA/big media companies are afraid to lose, although they might just win. I wonder if they want that media or not.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The Alexa that's referred to there is the predecessor to the Internet Archive (the company that did the web-crawling and content collection from 1995-1999). I think it was also associated with one of the big portal companies that went belly-up around 2000-2001?

      I thought that Alexa was defunct, although I could be wrong.
    • Yep, and the same one owned by Amazon now if I'm not mistaken.
  • Honestly, sometimes I think people post their websites to slashdot just to do load-testing.

  • >it gets hosted for free, for life

    How will they know I'm dead so they can take it down. Or, can I upload myself and become a Stored Mind, as in The Boy Who Would Live Forever?
  • Wow, free for life, right in a slashdot healine. I sill have my e-mail from USA.NET when I joined their e-mail service. I was an early supporter, so early I was able to snag foo@usa.net as my e-mail address. Their promotion and my e-mail from them said it was my account, free for life. That was, of course, before I gave it out widely to all of my friends and contacts, as well as encouraging many of my friends to get their usa.net free for life accounts. Then they announced that it would no longer be free fo

  • Cool! (Score:2)

    by Devil ( 16134 )
    Hey, great! Of course, it'll only take twenty minutes for OurMedia to get it OUT from a requesting page to the user's browser.
  • "Please don't post material that you don't have the right to publish or violate any copyright or other proprietary rights in your posts."

    That's all they say. It's good enough for me: I bought this CD; just putting it up on a Webdrive, and listening to it myself from wherever, is fair use of the copyrighted material. But for how many microseconds will a record company exec pause before deciding that someone else, somewhere, might listen to some music on which they have the copyright, without paying the reco

  • A little known media archive .. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eloquence ( 144160 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @06:18PM (#12004890)
    .. that everyone will start talking about soon is the Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org], which already hosts about 40,000 files (mostly images). All of the content on the Commons is under a free license. What is it? It's the media archive used by the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and Wikinews [wikinews.org]. It's been created in September last year and has been growing at a rapid pace ever since.

    If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects [wikimediafoundation.org], such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service [wikimedia.org], where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.

    Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations [wikimediafoundation.org] from people like you.

  • Coders needed for open source project (Score:5, Informative)

    by aaronsorkin ( 589236 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:45PM (#12007082)
    I was wondering whether to post this to /. or not.

    What the hell -- we're a free, not-for-profit, open-source media project. It doesn't get more Slashdotty than that.

    We're looking for coders to help out on Ourmedia -- to make it a Slashdotter's multimedia wet dream.

    The Ourmedia Project is relying on open-source developers to build new functionalities for the site -- such as media ratings, new RSS features, playlists, social networking, license searches, improved taxonomies -- and to help build a global registry connecting a network of grassroots media sites.

    That means six months from now we don't want to be just a destination website -- we want open-source schemas that will let any site hook into a global network of freely accessible grassroots media.

    But we can't pull that off unless more expert coders pitch in. (Here's our current project team [ourmedia.org] and advisory board [open-media.org].) (Apologies, we're adding more servers tonight.)

    See our Volunteer page [ourmedia.org] for details. Pass it along. Or ignore this, as you wish. :~) -- jd (email [mailto]), co-founder

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