It didn’t take long for Ourmedia to be slashdotted.

Just what we needed with our servers already getting slammed.

Consensus seems to be: This is a pretty cool thing. Some skepticism about the long-term promises we’re making (we’ll see how that goes). Disappointment at the no-porn rule. :~)

I dove in and answered a half-dozen questions. Also posted a call for volunteer coders to help us build out the site … we’ll see whether that gets yanked or not.

Exactly nine months ago, Marc Canter and I met up at Supernova. I mentioned to him the idea I’d been kicking around with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive to create a grassroots media organization, site, and registry called Open Media.

Turned out that Open Media was, ironically, a trademarked name. But Marc jumped at the chance to dive in as co-founder of this new entity — he’s been a multimedia pioneer for 15 years, and this is the culimination of what he’s been striving toward all these years.

Today, Ourmedia.org officially launched.

I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve put aside my freelance writing for the past half year to work almost exclusively on Ourmedia — on a strictly voluntary, unpaid basis. Why? Because I deeply believe that citizens media efforts such as this are the wave of the future.

As I wrote in the site’s Welcome message:

We are in the midst of the greatest boon in grassroots creativity in ages. Tools once available only to a professional elite are now being taken up by everyday citizens. Just as weblogs let millions of people become part of “the media,” so too are new tools empowering individuals to create video, audio, playlists and other works of personal media and to share them with a global audience.

The personal media revolution is turning multimedia. Digital stories, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, fan films, Flash animations, student films – all kinds of short multimedia works have begun to flower. Alas, the most compelling ones are scattered across the Web or hidden away on thousands of PCs, laptops and closed networks. These works deserve a wider audience.

That’s what Ourmedia is all about: Create. Share. Get noticed.

Marc and I believe that real change in the mediasphere will only come about when millions of us pick up the tools of digital creativity. The tools are now at hand. Let’s go.

I urge you to check out the site. But be gentle. We’re in alpha mode. That means you’ll find lots of stuff that isn’t working yet. We have a huge to-do list, and only a handful of programmers who are volunteering their time to make this all come together.

But I think they’ve done a top-notch job so far. I’ve never seen such a good-looking open-source project.

Some urls of note:

Ourmedia front page

Ourmedia Advisory Board

Ourmedia Project team

Mission statement

Press release: Spurring the citizens media revolution.

Ourmedia factoids.

I’m pretty darned proud. Thanks, especially, to all those who’ve helped us get to this point: Brewster Kahle, Larry Lessig, Parker Thompson, Michael Sullivan, Damien Newman, Stephen Downes, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Ashish Kumar, our talented moderator crew, metadata team, wiki members, and many others.

This could turn out to be something big.

Today a few colleagues and I began sending out invitations to a citizens media strategy session and social event.

We want to be as transparent as possible about this, so here’s what’s happening:

Citizens Media Strategy Session & Retreat
A strategy session to explore how various citizen media movements — open source software, free culture, grassroots journalism, digital/intellectual property rights, the commons, and media policy reform — can develop a more coordinated vision and begin sharing resources.

What:
An all-day meeting in San Francisco to bring together leaders of these movements to learn more about each other’s work and explore new ways to collaborate.

When:
• May 13 (Friday), 7-10 pm, social gathering and book release party (theme: the remix revolution) at a venue in San Francisco
• May 14 (Saturday), 10 am to 5 pm, agenda-focused sessions, San Francisco

Why:
Advocates of the various movements mentioned above tend to operate in separate silos, with little interaction, coordination or sharing of ideas and resources. There is untapped potential for fortifying everyone’s work, developing a more powerful public voice and tapping into a broad-based support system.

It’s short notice, but the time is ripe and we need the summer to plan for a large public event in the fall.

Goals:
• Plan a public conference to be held at a major university in the fall
• Improve the working relationships among citizens media groups
• Expand the grassroots media project spearheaded by Dan Gillmor
• Other projects, such as citizens television (please suggest them now).

Organizing committee:
- JD Lasica, author of “Darknet,” co-founder of Ourmedia.org
- Dan Gillmor, author of “We Media,” citizens journalism pioneer
- Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia (waiting for confirmation)
- Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist
- David Bollier, author of “Brand Name Bullies,” co-founder of Public Knowledge
- Mary Hodder, tech entrepreneur, founder of Napsterization blog
- Danny Schecter, MediaChannel.org
- Don Hazen, editor in chief, AlterNet, Independent Media Institute
- Scott Rosenberg, managing editor, Salon

The social event is open to the public. The strategy session is invitation-only (because of space limitations).

You’ll be hearing lots more about this in the weeks ahead.

Terrific editorial worth pointing to in today’s San Jose Mercury News:

… Are bloggers journalists?

The debate is not about who gets bragging rights to ink-stained wretchdom. It is about who is shielded under an important law that allows journalists to keep their sources confidential. The law is essential to a journalist’s ability to gather information while protecting whistle-blowers inside government, corporations or other organizations. Ultimately, it’s essential to a free press.

In the Apple case, the computer maker claims that the Web sites and blogs that published leaked information are not run by journalists and do not deserve the protections of the California Shield Law.

It’s a puzzling and misguided argument. The Web sites — Apple Insider, PowerPage and ThinkSecret — have been writing about Apple for some time. The people behind them collect information that is of interest to the public and publish it for the consumption, primarily, of a throng of avid Macintosh fans. In other words, they perform a function that is little different from that of scores of trade publications, or even the business sections of major newspapers.

The fact that they publish online and not in print is irrelevant. After all, no one would argue that online publications such as Salon.com, Slate and CNet — not to mention MercuryNews.com or WashingtonPost.com — are not journalism.

The California Shield Law is clear. It covers, among other people, “a publisher, editor, reporter or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication.” If the Web sites publish periodically, which they do, their reporters and publishers are protected. …