Roadmap

Following are high-priority items for development of Ourmedia 2.0, with a Priority assigned (1-5, with 5 the most urgent), timeline, and team members assigned to the task.

Set up staging environment

Goal: Many of the improvements to the site cannot realistically take place until a testing server is in place. Changes to the live code should only be done after it has been tested.

Priority: 5

Timeline: SFSU has given us 2 boxes, we could use them for development.

Team: Henrik B. will coordinate and delegate the projects taking place on it, bringing in teams for each project.

Stabilize the site

Goal: By moving to new servers, we will make the website more reliable, speedier, responsive and stable.

Priority: 5

Timeline: San Francisco State says they'll get us 6 new boxes. Until then, we have 2 new boxes at ServerBeach.

Team: unknown.

Better Ourmedia blogs

Goal: Drupal has a free built-in blog for every member that appears on their MyPage, but few people use them. Make them customizable with WordPress to create a true community. (The interface on the MyPages needs a lot of work, too.) Ideas:

  • jay says, "picture ryanedit.ourmedia.org, momentshowing.ourmedia.org. look at wordpress 2.0. make easily customizable. Use RSS 2.0 feeds." (JD: please expand on your vision. Would this ourmedia blog interact with the person's personal blog in some way? or is it just about urls and customizing the interface?)
  • Better My Pages/personal blogs: We need to find a way to let our members create compelling My Pages, through personalization, importing of their offsite blog content, etc. Since most members don't want to create yet another blog, is there a way to integrate members' outside blogs into Ourmedia through RSS feeds, or set up a separate area on Ourmedia so people can post to both their OM blog and personal blog at once. (49media grabs rss feeds.) This way, you can read Ryanne's blog on her personal site, or the same content and images on her Ourmedia personal blog. We've currently turned off the ability for members to post images on their OM blogs.

Priority: 5

Timeline:

Team: ??

Dynamic front page and site UI

Goal: Instead of a static front page that changes with a new editor of the week every week or two, we need a dynamic, constantly changing front page, where the users choose what goes on the front page, a la Digg. Also make it streamline, cut out the clutter, move the Ourmedia group blog elsewhere. Need to decide whether to add images to front page. There need to be multiple ways to expose all the media in Ourmedia. Our strategy calls for these primary techniques:

  • Featured artists. Find a way to highlight featured vloggers and musicians on the front page every day, if possible. pull out their logo, or ask them for an image.
  • Channels. Through both bottom-up tagging and traditional ontologies, let people create subject-style channels of related media: politics, food, current events, etc.
  • Ratings. The long-promised ability for members to rate any media work. Members will have option to turn this off on their media pages. We will let members rate works on a one to 10 scale, either just one metric or two (artistry/quality; usefulness/interestingness). JD has mockup of how this would display on media pages. Need to look into Drupal's ratings template.
  • Promote to front page. See Digg and reddit and Kuro5hin for members voting stories to the front page.
  • Tags. Tag clouds will give users an additional way to navigate through content and find related media. Some tags can be highlighted as channels.
  • Add this clip to MySpace or your blog. Created a "distributed Ourmedia" by having video content show up in different places. Perhaps do something similar to Flickr's Zeitgeist photo collection so you can show off your Ourmedia videos as thumbnails.
  • Member playlists. Let members group and recommend their favorite videos and audio on the site, and perhaps offsite. (Maybe a top 10 list, with a phrase describing why the member thinks it's cool.) We'll rotate member playlists onto the front page. Look at options, including Lucas Gonze's Webjay and Berkman's H2O project.
  • Browse media: we need to bring the Browse Media page back, so people can browse Ourmedia by media categories and subcategories and not just have one somewhat useless list of all the recent videos, audio files, etc. that have been published.
  • Top podcasts. Sasha Norkin at podcast.com has agreed to devote a person to cull the best podcasts on Ourmedia.
  • Feeds. There should be dozens of ways for people to access new or interesting new content on the site, based on tags, search results, new material, etc. Add RSS feed links to media subcategory pages such as nature photos, new age music, etc. See 49media.com.

Note: we may want to work with members of the openlaszlo.org community for a more interactive, media-rich Laszlo UI for Ourmedia. See this Dashboard page, for example (sign in as a guest).

Priority: 5

Timeline:

Team: Jeff K. is looking at how to create a rolling, Digg-like interface for front page. But we need to hire a designer to enhance the site with deeper redesign.

Initiative: Learning Center

Goal: We've launched a Learning Center (wiki here) to educate and train people about how to create their own personal media. We need to build it out, with both content written for the Learning Center and links to external resources. Hook into related open media projects. This will be a key differentiator for Ourmedia down the road -- we're not just a hard drive, but a true community where members can learn how to create better grassroots media.

Priority: 5

Timeline: Initial version is launched.

Team: Lisa Padilla, with help from Jen Simmons, Richard (the Richard Show), others.

Cross-site publishing

Goal: One reason for Youtube's success is how easy it is to upload video. We want to move away from Ourmedia as a destination site and allow members to publish to any of a dozen or more sites. Spin is adding this functionality into their client.

  • We may partner with Yahoo or Guba to permit publishing to "our" servers.
  • cross posting to blogs: allow cross-posting of media to members' blogs and possibly partner sites like Blip, Revver, etc.
  • integrate new enhancements from ccPublisher into Ourmedia Publisher.

Priority: 5

Timeline: unknown.

Team: Need someone conversant with Drupal to implement enhancements on website.

Tagging

Goal: Implement tagging on the site (Drupal 4.6 template already supports much of this) and tag clouds on all category pages and on front page. Make sure tagging services like Technorati pick these up. Tags should have feeds.

Priority: 5

Timeline:

Team: JD, project manager. Coders: Stephen Downes, Michael Sullivan?

Collections/Sets

Goal: We need to allow members to group their video, audio, text, images into collections (related items or sets), as Flickr does; to batch-upload items; and to share them with others rather than as one-off pieces. Is there a rudimentary collections module already on Drupal?

Priority: 4

Timeline: Q2 2006

Team: ??

Fix outstanding bugs & single sign-on

Goal: We need to make the Ourmedia user experience friendler. One important step is to create an integrated registration between Ourmedia and the Internet Archive (they've agreed to do so). A second is to eliminate some of the major bugs in the UI, such as the wrong license that appears when content is uploaded with OM Publisher, enabling html links and paragraph breaks in the main body of media descriptions, Ourmedia does not display properly in Firefox, etc. We'll compile a bugs list for this effort.

Priority: 4

Timeline: March-April

Team: ??

Initiative: Partnerships & The Sharing Network

Goal: We've said from the beginning that we don't want Ourmedia to be just another walled-garden destination website. We want to enable all facets of the personal media revolution. By fostering community across multiple sites, we can engender goodwill for Ourmedia and draw in participants from the open source community. Ourmedia becomes, then, not just a repository and website, but a glue or bonding agent that interconnects dozens of open media repositories.

This will take tangible form in several ways:

  • Front page partners: As part of our site redesign, we want to display content from Witness.org, Prx.org. NowPublic.com, the Conversation Network, BlogHer, possibly Robert Kaye's Music Brainz and other partners onto Ourmedia's front page. Can we pull in content partner through RSS or does it need to be entered by an editor by expanding our front page editing tool?
  • Media registry: Ourmedia and open source programmers will work with outside organizations, nonprofits and startups to devise common schemas and open APIs and promote open standards. Multimedia jukeboxes/image albums could be built through open APIs that hook into the registry. Odeo, Brightcove, NowPublic and the Open Media Network have agreed to participate in such a registry.

Priority: 4

Timeline: Front page partnerships visible by April. Media registry during Q4 2006.

Team: JD, project manager for front page partnerships. Separate open source team TBA for registry project. Mike Hudak of BlipTV expressed interest in working with us on this.

4. collections (partner with dabble:mary hodder's project)
--must allow people to organize video/audio they like in OM and share

Expand our toolsets

Goal: Look into integrating open source solutions, including the DTV player from participatoryculture.org and perhaps the RSS reader from FireAnt (RSS), and possibly proprietary tools such as Spin. Also build additional tools to enable members to capture, remix, republish and discuss reworked/collaborative media (role for collaboration tools like SpinXpress, attribution/provenance tools like Bitsi, other tools). Need to map this out with details. Principal ideas include: remix tools; station builder (for podcasts and/or video -- tie in to DTV); game maker; book maker (though we won't call it that).

Priority: 4

Timeline: Incorporate tools one at a time as they're ready, starting in late Q1.

Team: ??

Revenue generation

Goal: Ourmedia needs to begin generating revenue from these sources:

  • Corporate sponsorships/underwriting of sections of the site. Lisa and JD are working on this.
  • Events such as conferences, workshops, etc.

Other ideas for down the road:

  • Ecommerce: Create a WeMarketplace to let members sell their long-tail content through digital downloads. JD has 5-page plan for this major undertaking.
  • Syndication: Sell packages of syndicated videos to network carriers, device makers. Clear rights where needed.
  • Affiliate revenue: We have the potential to generate significant revenue from a Media Solutions storefront (see below).
  • Donations: Get donations from users earmarked for certain projects ("community marketplace"). Continue to get testimonials from people. Raise individual donations with fund-raising drive promoted on front page.
  • Store: Consider moving from Zazzle to Goodstorm.com. Need someone to take charge of setting up storefront displays.

Priority: 5

Timeline: Ongoing.

Team: Need more participants.

Initiative: Remix Central

Goal: Integrate a media remix module (which Creative Commons programmers are now finishing up) into Ourmedia, but also build it out to access public domain works, to expose the best remixes, etc. This will be a playground for creative people to come, find legally licensed video, audio and images, rework them into new creations, share them back with the community, and perhaps sell them (with the proper rights).

Priority: 3

Timeline: Q3 2006.

Team: Attorney Colette Voegele has agreed to help oversee the project.


Initiative: Music & Audio Licensing Center

Goal: Many sites offer a way to upload video and add a soundtrack, but none offer an easy solution that lets users drag and drop a song or audio clip from a database onto their video or media file. This could be a web service we license out.

Priority: 3

Timeline: Q4 2006.

Team: JD; interface with Mike L. at Creative Commons;

Media Solutions

Goal: Design and implement a two-pronged effort: (1) a digital media tools section that gives people information about dozens of software and hardware products that make it easier to create personal media, a sort of epinions for digital media products; and (2) a storefront that lets people purchase those products, through outside vendors' affiliate programs. Do it in an educational, noncommercial way as an offshoot of the Learning Center. Content partnerships likely. Sponsorship potential as well.

Priority: 3

Timeline: Q4 2006.

Team: ??

Miscellaneous

  • account pages: improvements to members' account & settings pages, such as encouraging them to use their real name, indicating which fields will be displayed and which fields will be hidden, etc. Priority: 3
  • stats on who and how many people are watching my media. Turn back on module showing how many friends and users are on site. Rework My Page to make metrics clearer. Priority: 2
  • automated moderating system: lighten the burden on moderators by having the community involved in moderating/flagging copywritten material, similar to what digg, flickr and others do. Also implement Jeff's new monitoring tool. Priority: 4
  • links to outside blogs: the connection between OM hosted-video and where the media is on the web must be more obvious. give a link to where people are putting their media--blog urls, homepages, etc. Priority: 2
  • Icons: Add icons (similar to Wharton's) at the bottom of all media pages instead of text links that no one notices. A quick win. Priority: 2
  • Codec support: Add support for MPEG-4, m4v, DivX, etc. on video pages so that you see the video rather than an empty box. 2 hours of work. Priority: 2
  • Sharing media: Gifting: Apple's iTunes 6 service has a "gifting" feature that lets users send songs and playlists to other people. YouTube and others let you easily email or share your discoveries with friends. We should do something similar. - 16.08.06, for research: boinboing about how this is done on YouTube Priority: 2
  • Flash conversion: Look into offering Flash as a secondary choice for all video files (QuickTime or Windows Media videos still don't always play on all platforms). Again, look at Laszlo Dashboard as well as Pandora (partner with them?).
  • Related media: Implement "related media," with thumbnail images, on media pages to help with navigation of site.


  • more robust search: Better search capability provided through an outside partner, including the ability to search by media type — video, audio, text, photos — as well as the ability to sort by key characteristics, such as license, image resolution or audio format. Ultimately, extend search to partner sites as well. Priority: 2

  • BitTorrent support: Archive has given the OK. Work with participatoryculture.org, Torrentocracy and/or Drupal community to offer BitTorrent, especially for large or popular files. Priority: 1
  • Groups: Redesign and build out social networking functionality of Groups. Priority: 1
  • Discussion groups: China's Baidu's search engine invented a tool that allows people to create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. We should make it easy for people to create instant conversation threads. Priority: 1

Other development items can be found on the main Ourmedia wiki.

= Top-level project goals =

  • Learning Center: We've launched the beginnings of a very ambitious Learning Center to educate and train people about how to create their own personal media. Now we need to build it out.
  • Richer site: Add new features and functionalities to make Ourmedia the central community hub on the Web for grassroots media. We need to get the tags, ratings and collections modules working.
  • Citizens media network: Make it easy for Ourmedia content to appear on other platforms (mobile phones, handheld devices, set-top boxes, tablet PCs) and networks (cable TV, Internet television, on-demand services).
  • Open standards: Ourmedia will work with other organizations to create an open media registry -- the connective glue that can interconnect dozens of open media repositories through common schemas, open APIs and a global registry.
  • Enrich the Commons: Ourmedia seeks to enrich the Commons with multimedia works. Multimedia jukeboxes, image albums and directory interfaces will hook into the resulting celestial jukebox of freely shareable rich media.
  • Enabling Remix Culture: By creating a rich archive of freely accessible audio, video and photos, we'll allow people to share works for remixing — legally.
  • Preservation of personal media: We help solve the 404 Page Not Found problem by providing long-term archiving of personal media.

= Sites to study =

Some of these sites are doing some things right: Digg, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, Veoh,Revver, FilmLoop (wow!), Blip.tv, BlipTV.com, Vsocial, YouAreTV, Castpost, DailyMotion, Vobbo, Stupid Videos, Vimeo (founder is Jakob Lodwick), GBSTV, Phanfare, ClipShack (co-founder is Cynthia Francis), Guba, Gofish, Loomia, 49media, Webshots, HomePortals, NetVibes (I like the arrow for scrolling thru photos), vmix.

Here's a blogger's post on what he believes are the best Flickr-like sites for video. Here's "Michael Arrington's post"<http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/Clipshack/> on the Flickrs of video.

What do you think they're doing well -- stuff we should emulate?

User suggestion: ManiaTV, a live stream of media; maybe we should think about a "best of ourmedia" generated from the (popular) titles from user's playlists... Plurn allows users to create streaming video and audio playlists via Flash.

Links:

Comments and discussion: