Mike Davidson posts today about this project called Our Media that boasts it will forever host your digital works for free without bandwidth or other costs. Sounds great? Is it truly sustainable? For something that says it is soon to leave beta status and will shortly hope to become a 501(c)(3) charitable organization – a designation that means United States donors may deduct the donation from income subject to tax – those are pretty big promises. Someone has to pay the bandwidth bill and pay for the software to find and store the media. And indeed, how long before the thing is bogged down with junk (you know the creative content that may not deserve to see the light of day? – just kidding art is all good – even spam and advertising content …), or at least different versions of the same thing? The concept is good, but the promises sound Utopian to me.
Until this is funded by a major endowment it is just big talk. If it works off of an advertising model, then it isn’t really free, because your work may be carried under an advertisement for something that you dislike immensely. So while it is without monetary cost, you are supporting something you don’t care for – arguably a cost. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted, but rather that it is likely to fail as those currently giving of time and talent are likely to shift focus, lose interest, and some will even die. The commenters over there (that I didn’t read until I was almost done with this post) seem equally rosy as I am. Maybe if enough of us tell them how silly they are, that will be just the ticket to get them motivated to get over the hump.
It will be interesting to see how usable the indexing is. To archive without reasonable retrieval is of no real value.
