Ourmedia Archive

The videobloggers (and Freevlog) get my thanks on this one. I figured I should make a post on this since I’ve made two comments on it recently…

The Internet Archive will provide storage for your files, because they are “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form” and the chances of the Internet Archive sticking around seems pretty good… The problem is that the time between uploading a file and having it available can be 24 hours. That’s where Ourmedia comes in. Ourmedia provides “free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches” and your files are actually stored in the Internet Archive, but the time between upload and having your file available is much faster. How much faster? My last 2.4 mb upload to Ourmedia took about 10 minutes. Yes, in 10 minutes the file was uploaded and I had the URL for it from the Internet Archive. Sweet!

Ourmedia also makes it really easy to license your work, choosing a Creative Commons license, or whatever other license you might want. They’ve been working on improvements and even in the last two weeks I’ve seen things getting better.

So, the bottom line: free hosting for your podcast or videoblog files (as well as other files.) This sort of solves that bandwidth problem… (It works for tinkernet.)

Are there any downsides? Well, if you really like the raw log data and stats, you may need to do a little extra hacking to get what you need. In theory you could get the URL of your media file on archive.org, and then create redirects on your own site so that requests go to your site, get logged, and the clients get the file via redirect to the actual URL. I imagine a nice little web app or WordPress plugin could do that quite easily…

Update: See JD Lasica’s post on Ourmedia…