This was a presentation by J.D. Lasica, founder of Ourmedia.com, to OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum held in Seoul, Korea on July 14.
?J.D. contrasts citizen’s media with legacy (traditional) media, which he sees as being top-down, one-way, centralized, closed, imperious and heavily filtered. In other words something done to you, not for you.
?Ourmedia is a 15-month-old nonprofit open source media project. People can post their media (photos, reports, video, audio) for others to see, hear or read. As an international platform for the global community it has only 20 percent of its members located in the U.S. Partners include Internet Archives, SFSU and others. Currently there are 110,000 members and 80 moderators from 14 countries involved.
?Their efforts also include a Personal Media Learning Center (launched in mid June of this year) where you can go to find how to use media tools such as video recorders, video editors, audio recorders, podcasts, etc. It also explores issues of copyright usage for reporters.
?Citizen media is part of a larger personal media revolution including OhmyNews, Wikipedia.org, Myspace, YouTube, Flicker, NowPublic, IndyMedia, Slashdot, Metafilter, KuroShin, Baristanet, Backfence and blog platforms: Sixapart, WordPress, Glogger and others.
?What are the distinctions between traditional media and citizen’s media? Though not absolutes, these include:
??- Traditional media gives lectures while citizen’s media promotes conversations.
??- Traditional media assumes passive consumers while citizen’s media empowers users.
??- Traditional media is one to many while citizen’s media is many to many.
??- Traditional media is corporate/autocratic while citizen’s media is democratic & collaborative.
??- Traditional media is composed of elite professionals while citizen’s media is consumer driven.
?Playing nice with others is important since interoperability is key! The Open Media Coalition has forty different programmers combining coming together to create interoperability and sharing resources between different citizen sites. These new standards include xm, media RSS, open APIs, metadata and more.
?Ourmedia wants people to partner with them, showcasing compelling citizen’s media content from partner sites on their front page. You can search for media by topic, group, top media, page views, comments and channels.
?One of their partners featuring “bottom-up” film translations is dotsub.com. At dotSUB you put up any video you may have and others will translate it into other languages. For example, from English to Portuguese. If you are proficient in the originating language and others you can translate it into another language yourself. Right now they offer the choice of translating video into any of 200 languages.
?You can go there to try it out yourself and try creating translations in your own language. To do so log in using “ohmy” as the username and “news” as the password.
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