Their media maybe.

I was/am excited and interested in the Ourmedia project. It’s a little hard to believe that anyone would be so generous of bandwidth and storage to offer to freely host your media for eternity, but from the folks who brought you the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, I suppose I should’t be surprised.

But I’m frustrated and nearly ready to give up.

I finally was able to post the audio to the video that Robert Scoble talked about on his blog and that I blogged about. That was after probably 6 or 7 different attempts to post it from several different machines resulting in different errors, from ones that indicated that the file already existed to ones that claimed an error occurred during submission of the variety “no_meta: None”, whatever that means.

Then there were my attempts to submit not using their tool but using the web form. Since the file is about 16Mb in size, this was patently inappropriate, but I figured better to have at least tried it. Those attempts resulted in nothing being published but no error message being returned. Not very helpful.

A message to the support email had gone unanswered for 24 hours, which I suppose isn’t that surpirsing, I’m sure that they’re getting a lot of emails.

I was finally able to get it posted, and was pretty excited and ready to try my next submission. However….

Much to my chagrin, my next submission attempt had similar results. I ripped the audio from a Microsoft Channel 9 video with Jim Gray that Jon Udell was looking for mostly as a test of a tool I found for this purpose, Geovid’s free Video mp3 Extractor.

After more than a dozen different attempts, almost all with the “550 Can’t create directory. File exists.” error, I’m giving up. Every upload I attemtped, from either machine I attempted it from, was attempted with a different filename and work title, so I find it exceedingly hard to believe that they were all already used.

Browsing the forums, I see that they know this tool is buggy and a new version is forthcoming, so when I say “I’m giving up” I mean “…for now.” I hope they can solve these problems soon, and I’d be happy to help test. One suggestion I would make, however, is to implement a way to save the meta-data you have to enter so that multiple retries aren’t so work-intensive.

Good luck, folks!

Later: Another suggestion for the Ourmedia folks. It’s apparent from the comments in the forum I linked to above that Ourmedia is aware of a problem relating to the 550 error and the uploading tool (and potentialy other errors with uploading as well). It would be helpful of they would pin a forum post to the top of the board in the Uploading Problems topic that listed the problems they knew about, what potential solutions / workarounds there are, and how they’re planning to resolve the issues. It would cut down on repetetive posts and give more folks the info they need more quickly.

They could also stand to implement a search for just the forums. When I see the search box on Ourmedia, my initial assumption is that it’f for searching for content (media, blog posts, &ct) only.