For just over a year we've been building
an exciting new project for the web called GNU MediaGoblin
MediaGoblin is a media publishing system
for hosting audio, video, images, and more.
It's free software, and anyone can run it.
... and customize it.
It can do a lot of cool things, including supporting multiple media types,
from images, to videos, to audio
This means you can have all your media in one place.
It's also built for extensibility.
You can add entirely new media types,
even something crazy like ascii art. Why not?
MediaGoblin is heading in awesome directions
to help make the web a more beautiful place.
But we need YOUR help to make it happen!
The internet and the web were designed to be decentralized
This is great, because it enables a global and diverse voice.
It's also very resilient; if one server goes down for whatever reason,
the internet still exists.
To quote John Gilmore, "The Net interprets censorship as damage
and routes around it."
But recently, the internet has been moving in a different direction...
Increasingly instead of a resilient web of smaller websites
we have larger, more centralized sites
This has several problems.
For one thing, the more centralized the web becomes,
the easier it is for organizations to automate censorship,
either via the centralized host directly,
or even through the pressures of external institutions.
In such a system, the internet can't route around damage any more.
Things are much more fragile generally, too.
In a more decentralized web,
if one node goes out, the whole system lives on.
But what if everyone's photos were on Flickr
and it disappeared? What would happen if YouTube went away?
What would happen to cat videos on the internet?
It would be like a cat massacre.
This leads to a Sad Internet.
This is why we're building MediaGoblin.
MediaGoblin is devoted to freedom and putting power back into the hands of users.
It's a GNU project because we care a lot about freedom.
And there's a lot of stuff we've done that's cool.
We have support for all different types of media..
...and support for more could happen soon!
We have theming so you can make it look any way you want.
We have OpenStreetMap Support, so you can see where your pictures were taken!
We have commenting and other things that web users are used to.
It's real software, you can run it yourself!
Over the last year and a half, we have had over 50 contributors
and have made several significant releases
This is exciting times!
But we need your help!
MediaGoblin has come a long way,
but there's a lot more it really needs
so it can be the best media hosting option that there is.
Most noticeably, we need federation.
Federation is how email works:
you and your friends might be on entirely different servers
but emailing between them feels like they're on the same thing.
We want media hosting to work the same way.
StatusNet, the federated microblog service
has paved the way for a lot of the functionality we'll need...
but serving up video, sound and images
has it's own thorny problems and that's why we need your help.
We have awesome programmers, and we know how to build this stuff!
But MediaGoblin needs dedicated resources
so the project can get the attention it needs.
This is also known as the "coders gotta eat" problem.
We have a great roadmap and we want you to pitch in some money
so we can hire our talented developers and designers
to build the pieces MediaGoblin needs
to reach its full awesome potential.
Developers are standing by,
ready to give us their hours, but we need your support.
Thank you for listening.
Please support MediaGoblin
and help us make the world's most beautiful media publishing future come true!