New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

Just when Ourmedia started to make news, Google announced its own video publishing service. Google is basically going to let you sell your videos online. So though Ourmedia and Google have different goals, comparisions are inevitable.

Our role with Ourmedia is to develop the technology behind it. We are pretty resource constrained right now because Ourmedia is yet to get funded so there is just enough money to fund a couple of devs.

There is a fundamental difference between Google Video and Ourmedia. Ourmedia is not just about publishing your media online, it also aims to develop a community around what people post there. We have forums, blogs, group blog, commenting, buddy lists etc. Ourmedia is a gathering place for media enthusiasts. It is less about selling, more about sharing. Of course, it is entirely possible to use Ourmedia to showcase your work and then sell it elsewhere. And that is great. But fundamentally, Ourmedia is not an e-commerce site. It is a social networking site. Soon, we will add groups functionality to Ourmedia. So, you can go and create a group for "Fans of Bollywood Dance-Around-Tree Songs" or whatever. The power of community is behind us. And if we can harness it, Ourmedia will be unstoppable.

Not much is known about the Google video service. From what I can make out, you can upload a video and it becomes searchable through Google search. There will eventually be a way to sell your videos online and Google will probably take a cut out of it. I don't know if they plan to have community features integrated with Google video. Google already has a thriving social network in the form of Orkut which they could use to match and exceed what Ourmedia has to offer. Even then, we have a couple of innovations up our sleeves, which will emerge with time.

Overall, I am excited to have Google in this space. It can only attract more attention towards Ourmedia. We would have to get real nerdy to be able to match Google in technology. It will be interesting to see how they handle uploads and embedding videos in web pages. We have discovered the hard way that supporting unlimited number of media formats is no fun. We recently fixed some huge upload issues we were facing. So things are running much more smoothly now.

I would be interested to know what Google feels about Ourmedia. In some ways, the two can complement each other - Ourmedia could be the place where people showcase their 'trailers' or clippings and then sell them on Google Video. On the other hand, Ourmedia provides free and unlimited storage with hardly any strings attached - something that Google might be unwilling to do.

So the next few months are going to be exciting times for citizen journalism and grassroots media. Will Microsoft and Yahoo take cue from Google and come up with something of their own? Will Ourmedia thrive along with or inspite of Google Videos? Will we be able to innovate enough to make Ourmedia stand apart? Only time will tell!