Open Content Alliance
Yahoo! is teaming up with The Internet Archive to help build a digital archive of "globally sourced digital collections, including multimedia content". I understand this means books, academic material, audio and video media. Question: does this crossover with OurMedia.org - or will there be arbitary boundaries between 'professional' and amateur media content?
Called the Open Content Alliance, hopefully one of the main byproducts of this effort will be to make available a huge amount of media for people to remix and create new content from. I say hopefully, because it'll be up to the contributers to decide what (if any) copyright will apply. But the OCA is encouraging "the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive", while respecting copyright.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, thinks this may become the 21st century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. Current contributers include Yahoo!, O'Reilly Media, Adobe and others. It's worth noting that this probably ties in very well with Yahoo!'s media plans, which I wrote about in a recent ZDNet post.
PaidContent.org is tracking the story, as is of course tech.memeorandum.
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Looks like an interesting idea. One cannot help but speculate on whether they may experience some of the same problems Google did with their "library" project.
While it seems to have potential I am somewhat skeptical since in the past when Yahoo has stuck its finger in the pie, the results have generally been less than salutary (eg Geocities, Webrings, etc.)
Hopefully it won't mean the disappearance of archive.org as a seperate entity as that resource is far too useful as it is to be totally subsumed by a larger collection.