Richard BF

Some of my pet peeves are stupid designers and developers, bad usability, and projects going public before they’re supposed to, thus turning users into beta testers. OurMedia.org pretty much has them all. Welcome to my longest ever blog post. It’s a rant, so feel free to skip it.

Here’s the original post that I had ready to go last week, but decided not to post at the last minute.

It is somewhat ironic that the announcement and opening of ourmedia.org
was their first lesson in communication. The self proclaimed “free,
not-for-profit effort to create a global home for grassroots media”, hit
the blogosphere sounding like just one of many recent media storage
sites, which is probably why even today, a week after the fact, there’s
only one story on it in Google News.

The announcement focussed more on them being free, the problems with
bandwidth, them being free, content longevity and them being free, than
it did on explaining their goals, backers and relationship with other
organisations. It’s not rocket science to understand that geeks tend to
catch on to the technology pretty quick, and it is the business side of
the enterprise that is usually their initial concern. In fact the thing
about “grass roots media” tends to be their anti establishment stance.
Yet OurMedia’s tone seemed patronising and vague when discussing
anything but the few and quite common benefits they’re actually offering
on their site. OurMedia launch day plus one, and TheirMedia seems like a
more appropriate name.

References to the Internet Archive hosting some of the content, without
explaining their real connection with the project, and several for
profit organisations providing support and infrastructure, certainly
didn’t help improve the situation. Many were asking why they’d bother
moving away from Internet Archive which already provides media hosting,
and with Marc Canter involved, what is their future business model,
what’s the catch?

Eventually the story was slashdotted, bringing OurMedia’s servers to
their knees, which simply added to the negativity that it had already
received in the slashdot forums, and various content related email
groups around the Internet. With the day’s catch phrases being “how free
is free?”, “how long is forever?”, and “how can you possibly out archive
the Internet Archive?”, you have to ask, did anyone at OurMedia actually
think through how the message would be received in the blogosphere, and
how it should have been delivered?

When the smoke started to clear, the OurMedia folks tried to clarify
some of the statements they’d made including the role of Internet
Archive. To be fair, they have personally come out to various forums on
the ‘net to try to clarify the message, but with answers ranging from
OurMedia being part of IA, through to IA simply hosting the content,
which is what they do with every other web site on the Internet anyway,
the message from OurMedia still seems quite vague.

You could argue that any discussion is good for OurMedia, and with Marc
Canter involved, the principles behind Marquee may well be behind
their lack of concern for a clearer message. I for one don’t buy that,
but I’m not going to go into differences here and now.

Ultimately, I’m sure in the short term OurMedia will provide a useful
service for “grass roots media”, but the question still remains: for an
organisation that found it difficult to communicate with their audience
about the most significant announcement they’ll ever make, their own
existence, if you’re grass roots media, would you let them host and
manage your content? Time will tell.

I thought it was a nice insightful yet somewhat devil’s advocate kind of piece, something appropriate for my blog. But at the last minute, something popped up on the videoblogging email group, which instead made me post the following:

Hi all,

I think I’m about to get myself into trouble, but this is why we’re here. So I’ll just come out and say it, and then get back in my hole and I won’t say anything else about it, OK? 🙂

IA is slow loading… maybe a vlog clog courtesy of ourmedia 😉

You know, I don’t want to put a downer on the whole OurMedia thing, because the people on here that are a part of that project seem to be nice folks, but…

I’m really sorry, but I just don’t get why OurMedia is so great. I already drink the citizen media Kool Aid, I already use the Internet Archive, and I already understand a lot about social networking and microcontent. What’s in it for me? (don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical)

They come riding in on their self appointed white horse of citizen media, claiming all these things that are slightly condescending distortions of the truth, and expect us to just blindly jump on board. OK, that’s too harsh, but that’s exactly what big media expect, and one of things that we’re trying to fight against.

• There are other media hosting sites, otherwise we wouldn’t all be here
• They cannot guarantee they’ll stay around forever, as they’re donation and sponsorship based
• They cannot guarantee to always be free, as they’re donation and sponsorship based
• They can’t seem to present a common message about their actual relationship with Internet Archive
• Their release announcements were slammed and slashdotted (and by some of the sane ones), making me question whether any thought was given to how they were going to deliver their message to their target audience: us
• They outsourced their development to India, not that that worries me, being in Australia, but it may affect U.S. folks in some way
• The focus of their announcement seems to be “it’s free, and these Internet celebrities are involved”, instead of “this is the new media, this is why it is important, this is why we’re here”
• Internet Archive seems to have made no announcement at all, or at least I haven’t seen it
• Their upload and display problems are ongoing (but I do realise that they’re teething problems)
• Internet Archive slurps up everything anyway, so to say “most of our content is stored on the Internet Archive” is pretty silly, because most of every web site is stored on the Internet Archive. Seems more like a way to give the impression it is an IA project, when it is not.

I will comment on one particular post. (Sorry about this, because I do love your work JD)

5) The Archive is a fairly static experience. Ourmedia has completely new content on the front page every week, free member blogs, and new ways to slice and dice content:

IA also highlights new content, free member blogs aren’t exactly a big draw card, and IA being a static experience is actually it’s biggest draw card. We’re talking about the new media, distributed, long tail, markets are conversations, choice of tools, citizen journalism, we are the media. Arguably, one single site trying to be everything to everyone, goes against so many of these ideals, and on the business side historically is a proven plan for failure.

Not only that, but I think I have a problem with people being singled out and highlighted on a home page. Who makes that decision? When there’s millions of videobloggers amongst us, who gets to decide which few get publicity? Who decides what is “good” and “worth a watch”? The whole point of citizen media is that we no longer have false idols presenting us with their interpretation of what is news, what is good and bad, and continually propping up the evil power law. I know “ways to slice and dice” is a solution, but it too has problems.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying OurMedia are evil, or won’t succeed, because I do believe they’ll be a useful tool for the future. But the message needs to be managed better, by people who understand who “we” are and talk in our language.

For my content though, Internet Archive is still the best bet. After all, everything’s going to end up there anyway.

I got a couple fo replies, which were all nice, a couple hinted at issues they had, but most just tried to reassure that the guys behind it are really working hard to make things right. I don’t doubt they are.

So with Internet Archive currently not accepting uploads via the ccPublisher tool, and with two videos to upload, I decided to give OurMedia a go. I’ve heard it is much easier that Internet Archive, so what the heck. The ccPublisher tool is fairly buggy, but for the last few days has been crashing at the end of an upload with a “meta data: none” error, whatever that means.

Here’s my follow up post to the videoblogging email list, on my experience using OurMedia.org.

IA is currently burping with meta errors, so I thought I’d try OurMedia. So I went there and clicked on register, typed in my account name, password and my name, and clicked on the whatever the button was. There was text at the bottom of the form explaining that my name would be used on the site, and not my account name.

The site then came back with another form with an error, telling me that my archive.org account is invalid. What the? Then it prompts me for my Internet Archive account details. Stupidly I entered them, and clicked the button.

I was then popped into three tabbed forms, one with strange embedded three half tabbed forms, prompting me for personal information. So I entered some of this, and clicked on save. All good, I’m registered.

So then I see that my archive.org account name (one of my many email addresses) is displayed on the site, even when the form said it wouldn’t be. This worried me, so I logged out from the site, then as an anonymous user did a search for me. It came up yet again with my email address as my account, which is very upsetting.

I decided to change my account name, so that my email address wouldn’t be displayed, so I logged in again, and changed that to another account name that I use, clicked save and it came back and said that account name is already in use. It’s fairly obscure, so that was strange. I logged out again and ran a search for my original account name, and it came up with my details. So obviously my first registration worked, but bounced me out into my archive.org account for some reason.

So I try to log in as the original account name instead of the second, but the password has been trashed for some reason, and there’s no way that I can see to ask OurMedia to send me a copy of the password.

So now, in summary, I have one account with a password that I don’t know, and I have another account as my email address, which I don’t want people to see. And I can’t send an email to the admins to fix it, because there isn’t one on the site.

I’m not making this up, I really was trying to use and appreciate OurMedia, but to be honest I don’t think it is anywhere near ready for primetime. Have the registration use cases been tested and QAed for example?

I think I’ll just wait for ccPublisher to start working again. But in the meantime, who do I speak to about getting my email address removed from the site?

I went to bed shaking my head, mumbling to myself that I should have trusted my instincts.

So anyway, I got up this morning, determined to get my uploads into the archive somehow. So I went back to OurMedia.org, in the hope that a fresh start would help me work out the problem. With a couple of helpful tips from the videoblogging list, including a pointer to the smallest of small site footers where you can only just read the words “report a bug”, I went back to the original account I created, and saw a “forgotten my password” hyperlink that I swear wasn’t there last night. I clicked on that and was asked for my account and email address, which I entered, and waited.

Luckily, my domain admin saw the email come in with a bad mailbox name, and forwarded me the email. That gave me the password for the first account, so I logged in to that and found that the email address was wrong. So I fixed the email address and also entered the password for my Internet Archive account password, and clicked save. The form is so bad, nowhere does it ask for your Internet Archive account, and only now do I know that the email address you enter also has to be your IA account. So the only email address you can use on OurMedia, is the one you use to log into IA. Stupid.

So then the page comes back with an error, saying the email address is already taken. What? This must be the second account, but what if I wanted to create two OurMedia users, and just use the same email address? You mean I can’t do that? That’s just stupid.

So I logged out of the original account, logged into the new account with the IA email address, and changed the email address to something else. The problem though is that OurMedia allows account names which contain spaces, thus confusing the whole account name vs. user name issue. You never know which one you’re changing, and because you can inline change your account name, it’s doubly confusing.

Finally, after jumping through a few more hoops which I’ll spare you from, I managed to get the original account set up correctly, and the second one sitting there in some hopefully soon to be deleted (when the admins decide to get back to me) mangled state.

Right, so I have an account on OurMedia, which only took the best part of 3 hours across two easter holidays, which I consider valuable because it’s supposed to be downtime for me from the usual tech stuff I do at work. Grr…

Next step is to download their Internet Archive publishing tool, which from the description sounded awfully familiar. The download says they don’t create any desktop or tray icons, which is supposed to be a positive thing. But I’m guessing they say this because they simply haven’t bothered to do this yet, because after downloading and running the install, it hides itself inside the Program Files directory (yes I know, I’m doing this from my PC, just deal with it), without adding itself to the Start/Programs menu.

Now inside the directory, are about 38 files, including 4 applications with obscure names. Which to run? Oh look, two of them are called cd.exe and cct.exe, looking a lot like the ccPublisher tools. So I decide to run ompub.exe, and up it comes, basically ccPublisher with some extra information. As I click through each dialog in the wizard, it is obvious that this is in fact ccPublisher (and written by the same guy), but with extra meta data fields added. It even has the same known bugs as ccPublisher.

So my question is: is this why ccPublisher has been languishing, and not having it’s bugs fixed? Because OurMedia wanted their own tool, and wasted the developer’s time when he could have been fixing ccPublisher for Creative Commons? And I’m gussing here that the extra meta data errors on Internet Archive are now caused by the extended API requirements from OurMedia.

With the upload finally complete, it ends up with an OurMedia URL. The tool very clearly saying that it has been sent to both OurMedia and Internet Archive, which isn’t actually true, it only goes to Internet Archive.

As at the time of this post, I’m waiting for the supposed hour it takes for my video to clear OurMedia and get published. So fingers crossed, my next post will contain an OurMedia enclosure.

As for OurMedia? It’s way too early to open this site to the public. It needs extensive testing, well any testing would have been good. The graphic design looks OK, but the usability and help texts are shocking, and whoever designed those should never work in the industry again. I’m really pissed off that they’ve taken valuable development time away from ccPublisher, and I’m still worried that my email address and account password might be in view on the site in some way.

When Internet Archive starts working again, I’ll definitely be moving this upload back across to there, and leaving OurMedia for at least six months before taking another look. I would advise that you do the same.