Today we’re launching a new initiative called the Open Media Coalition.

The idea is a simple one: Too often, open media efforts get mired in vertical silos. Project teams and developers don’t talk or collaborate across different initiatives. So a group of us decided it was time to create a working group of developers and open media advocates who will work together to share and write code on a variety of open media projects as well as to discuss how to help extend the concept of “open media.”

We don’t have a set agenda, so we’ll discuss setting priorities. Among the projects being considered at the outset: cross-site publishing; tags; playlists; microformats; torrents; remix tools; payment systems; access to CC and public domain content; etc.

Understand, this ain’t another pie-in-the-sky forum to toss around Big Ideas. It’s a working group to get things done.

The idea here is not new. Last fall, New York University’s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) in collaboration with Unmediated.org and the Project for Open Source Media (POSM.tv) hosted a successful open media developers summit, and we see these two efforts likely merging.

From the new wiki:

The Open Media Coalition is a developer-led working group whose aim is to share and write code on a variety of projects related to the concept of “open media.” Members will work to open up and share APIs and schemas; to enhance interoperability; to develop new standards that help promote independent media; and to evangelize a set of principles that underlie this movement.

Interested in joining this effort as a doer, not just an observer? Just go to openmediacoalition.org and sign up, or email me.

Here are two interviews I conducted at Vloggercon last weekend and just posted to my RealPeopleNetwork blog: Rachel and Noah from 88Slide and Ken Nichols from AskaNinja.com. A glimpse at some fun and burgeoning grassroots creativity.

In 1996 I wrote a piece in the American Journalism Review headlined Net Gain that included a passage about Steve Rosenbaum, then the brains behind MTV’s “MTV News Unfiltered.”

So it was great, after nine years, to meet Steve face to face at Vloggercon on Sunday (when we both appeared on panels opposite each other).

Here’s a piece that appeared today (with some coding that I corrected) in Steve’s Magnify Media:

Peer Production: Rethinking the Economics of Collaboration

By Steve Rosenbaum

Back in the good old days, productions were like families. People joined together with a common goal — to make a film — and they worked hard to make that goal into a finished film.

As pressure on costs has increased, and the fees that freelancers earn in reality TV have risen, however, documentary production has become a more complex economic arrangement.

But technology and passion have helped to relight the content-driven world of doc production. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of tools, there is a future just around the corner, in which the key word is “collaboration.” This future is exciting and empowering, and the elements are visible if you look for them.

Continue reading »

NY Times: Camera. Action. Edit. Now, Await Reviews.

The music video for the surreal folk song “I Got a Bunny,” written and performed by Juanito Moore, is not something you will see on VH1.

ut the video, shot on a rainy sidewalk in front of Mr. Moore’s home in Grand Rapids, Mich., has another distinction: it was assembled, not in a traditional cutting room or with PC-based editing software, but entirely on the Web, using an online service called Jumpcut. …

While sites like YouTube and Veoh have lately become popular for allowing users to share their self-produced videos, Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is part of a new class of sites that also offer simple tools for stringing together video clips and then adding soundtracks, titles, transitions and unusual visual effects.

All of the sites, which include Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.

Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.

“We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing,” said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. “We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail.” …

Saw the guys from Eyespot, Jumpcut and VideoEgg at Under the Radar yesterday, after appearing on stage with the CTO of Eyespot at Vloggercon on Sunday. These companies are doing amazing things, even if TechCrunch is souring on the space because it’s getting more crowded.

Spent Wednesday at Under the Radar Conference: Why Digital Media Matters. A crowd of 300 or so of the digerati turned out at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View for a day of Web 2.0 demos and hallway schmoozing. Early on, Stowe Boyd and I discovered that the wi-fi set up for the gathering would not work if you had an Apple laptop — as about 20 of us did. (I used to work for a time at Microsoft; sad to see that some things haven’t changed. Advice to the conference organizers: Make sure you don’t blow off the creative, Mac-savvy portion of your audience.)

Denmark West, EVP at MTV Networks, showed up for a frank fireside chat about MTV’s role in the brave new online world. (See above for a photo of him I shot.) I was surprised and impressed by his positive words for open source and social media. He singled out Songbird, whose demo he saw a few hours before, for praise. (Songbird is a media player built from the Firefox browser engine.)

Lots of interesting Web 2.0 startups put their wares on view throughout the day. Alas, the lack of wi-fi yesterday put a crimp in my plans to do so, so I’ll instead point to some other bloggers’ writeups:

Stowe Boyd: Under the Radar and STIRR

Stowe Boyd: Michael Arrington on “Web 2.0 is Dead!”

Dan Farber: MTV’s Denmark West on super-serving the audience

Meantime, more tech news:

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch: AOL-Netscape Launches Massive “Digg Killer” (and San Jose Merc article on Netscape’s relaunch, in which AOL exec Jason Calacanis says of the new social news site, “It’s sort of like open-source journalism.”)

TechCrunch on Ray Ozzie to replace Gates as Chief Software architect (and CNN: Gates to leave day-to-day role at Microsoft).

I’ve been swamped even more than usual this week, so I haven’t been able to mention the VertigoCon gathering held Monday on the heels of Vloggercon. Some 45 developers and figures in the grassroots media movement showed up at the San Francisco State University Downtown Center for a combined meeting of Video Vertigo and the Open Media Coaliton to discuss interoperability — how to share tags, comments, media, etc., more easily between independent media sites.

We sketched out a fair-sized list of open APIs that can be shared across sites — a list that needs to grow considerably over the coming months. Here’s Mike Hudack of Blip talking about idenity, one of the subjects tackled during the afternoon by the 40 guys and four women who turned out.

Check out my Flickr page for a few photos from the gathering. More on the Open Media Coalition in a bit.