Ourmedia.org: host your media free...forever

Ourmedia.org debuted today! (Though it is an alpha stage release and is currently getting hammered on -- at 4:20pm Central Time -- making it verrrry slow).

So what is it and why do I think it is so cool? "Create. Share. Get noticed. That's what Ourmedia is about. Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We'll host your media forever — for free.

Video blogs, photo albums, home movies, podcasting, digital art, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, audio interviews, digital storytelling, children's tales, Flash animations, student films, mash-ups — all kinds of digital works have begun to flourish as the Internet rises up alongside big media as a place where we’ll gather to inform, entertain and astound each other."

I've been aware of this for some time, but am *very* impressed with what they delivered even if it's an alpha stage. If it's this good now...what will the beta be like?  With podcasting, videoblogging, and all of the fabulous tools to create audio and video content, the gating factor has been availability, bandwidth and distribution. This takes a major step toward solving it..though I get concerned that there will be issues with scalability bandwidth that will be hard to solve.

This makes me wonder about their bullet point on an "about" page that simply says "BitTorrent support". What about deploying open source driven, free edge servers similiar to what Akamai offers? I could see the beneficiaries of this (blogging hosters, audio/video hosting companies) providing a donated node. Or maybe BitTorrent (BT) is the model and Ourmedia will help mainstream the client (or protocols) and have BT built in to devices, software and more.

JD Lasica (founder with Marc Canter...and help from others) has a great writeup on the launch.