Those who give up easily on new sites might have already passed by ourmedia which makes very attractive promises:

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

Update: Actually, there are a few catches.

For those who are be able to register and/or login via archive.org user/pass to the new ourmedia.org site, the payoff could be well worth it. Alas, I am not the only one who had difficulty getting through the gate apparently:

The Our Media experience was a bit rough. Had to get two sets of passports. Kim Cameron, please save us and give us an identity system that everyone will trust and use!

Yeah, no doubt. I tried my archive user/pass (which shows me logged in just fine there) and that didn’t work at ourmedia. So then I tried registering anew — three times — and the first time it returned the vexing error message pictured at the top of this post and did not send the email it said it sent. The second time I registered it told me the username chosen was already taken. The third time I got the same message as the first try, including the part about their being an error with the username and password but that the “email has been sent successfully.” Huh? I checked my email, though, and this third time I did receive an email with a password and I was able to login successfully with that information.

Talk about mixed messages. First they are down for a week because of server problems and then they get the site up and make it difficult to register and login. Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth here, but perhaps this one should have stayed in the lab a little bit longer … maybe?

The email you receive once successfully registering will tell you the following:

You now have a free personal blog and may post comments and participate in our Forums. If you wish to publish media — which almost all Ourmedia members do — you also need to take 15 seconds to register at the Internet Archive…

So apparently you can’t use the archive.org user/pass to login, you do need separate registration for ourmedia? I did a little more digging around and found on this page an explanation:

We require dual registration because the Internet Archive stores all the media files on Ourmedia and merging our registration systems will require some effort.

So, hopefully to save others some grief, these are the steps to be able to post free audio and video files:

1) register at ourmedia.org
2) regster at archive.org, if you aren’t already registered
3) once you receive the email from ourmedia, then login and go to the EDIT screen and change to the email address and username to whatever you used at archive.org. If they are the same, no change is required. Scroll down to the place to add your archive.org password.
4) In the “My Controls” section along the left hand menu in ourmedia choose “publish my media”
5) From the next menu choose whichever applies: video, audio, images or text (during my testing, Interactive and Mixed were not linked yet)
6) Fill out the form completely, hit preview to check things over and then “Submit” when you are ready to publish.

Happy publishing to you!

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