[advocacy] Advocating Ogg Vorbis audio

[Erik Moeller]

Hi,

as I was one of the folks suggesting the creation of an advocacy 
mailing list, I think it's time for me to speak up on what I think we 
non-developers can do to promote the use of Ogg Vorbis as an open 
audio standard. (I'm also interested in Xiph's other projects, but OV 
is my major interest right now.)

Most of us probably agree that Ogg Vorbis is superior to MP3 in many, 
if not all respects. I can see four reasons why people are not using 
OGG yet:

    - They don't know it
    - Even if they know it, they don't now how to use it
    - They have heard about it, but don't know what makes it better
      than MP3 (and may be unsure whether they should use it when
      it's still in beta)
    - The software they use doesn't support it

These are mainly marketing problems and not technical problems. But 
it's obvious that the good folks behind Ogg Vorbis don't have the 
marketing power of Microsoft or even Thompson/Fraunhofer. So they 
need our support. What exactly can we do?

Well, there's lots of stuff we can do actually, and in order for our 
activities to be successful, we need to coordinate and organize them. 
Here's what we should do:

    - spread the word about Ogg to our friends and family -- 
      this is something that can obviously only be done on a
      very individual level.
    - spread OGG files! :-) How about copyright-free speeches and
      other archive material?
    - write tutorials and FAQs for newbies (check existing ones
      first). 
           - ask creators of cd burning software, cd-rippers, encoders etc.
      to support/include OGG
    - ask creators of video codecs to include OGG for audio encoding
    - ask creators of video games to use OGG for their soundtracks
    - ask streaming media services to use OGG instead of MP3 or other 
      formats
    - ask radio stations to release archival material in OGG
    - ask the media to include OGG on CD-ROMs instead of MP3s
    - encourage artists to spread their work in OGG / help them spread
      their work if they use OGG
    - ask universities to release speeches and audiostreams in OGG
    - etc. etc. etc.

How do we organize this work? That's the main problem, I think. We 
need to maintain documents of the companies, individuals etc. that we 
want to write to and that we have already written to. There are two 
convenient ways that I can think of right now how to manage these 
documents.

    - have a maintainer for each document who takes care of
      implementing changes
    - have a broad access policy to all documents

Now, I would definitely prefer the latter. A wiki (a set of webpages 
that can be edited by anyone) is to open for my taste, though. Can 
anyone think of something better? We might also just send the 
respective documents (e.g. "CD-Ripper List V1.3") to the mailing 
list, following an established standard. What do you think? Can you 
think of other tasks that need to be done that aren't listed above?

Regards,

Erik Moeller


-- 
Scientific Reviewer, Freelancer, Humanist -- Berlin/Germany
Phone: +49-30-45491008 - Web: <http://www.humanist.de/erik>
The Origins of Peace and Violence: <http://www.violence.de>

"History is full of people who, out of fear or ignorance or the lust 
for power, have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly
belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again." -- Carl Sagan

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'advocacy-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.