I have been in the “blogosphere” as it is called for a pretty long time. I’ve read Instapundit since a few months after its launch, I’ve been blogging on the Commentator site since late 2002. At one point I read upwards of 60 blogs a day. Now I read five, and Drudge Report, and write this tiny, no-traffic blog for purely my own amusement. It should be clear that I am not a blog-triumphalist, but it should also be clear that I think the blogosphere has a lot to offer.
That said, I think the newest adventure by a bunch of righty blog heavy-weights is an incredibly stupid dead-end project doomed to the most spectacular of public failures.
First of all, they didn’t even settle on a name until days before their lauch. It was Pajamas Media for a good long time, and then, suddenly, it was OSM: Open Source Media. Trouble is, Open Source Media predates them by about six months, and they’ve been asked to stop using the name. Furthermore, Pajamas Media was at least sort of catchy, and shared a sort of inside joke with the rest of the blogsphere. “Open Source Media” is vague, makes me think of Linux, and tells me nothing about what they actually plan to do.
And what exactly they plan to do also seems to be up in the air. Is it advertising? Is it news? Is it a blog round up? YES! Take a look at the OSM website. About all you can really say is that it looks nice. It has some AP headlines, and some, somewhat hilariously, from Xinhua*. It has a blog round up feature, that seems to be theme based and is called (in one of the worst lumber-jack-related puns I’ve ever seen) “BlogJam”. It’s got that neat little “Best of the Blogs” daily post down there, something about bird flu on the top, and a fairly typical website side bar.
So, what does that give OSM over the Drudge Report, YahooNews and any half-decent RSS reader? Absolutely nothing. I guess the link for all of the blog carnivals is pretty nice, but the OSM site offers me (a rather casual reader of blogs, honestly) exactly nothing I can’t get from the Hotline’s Blogometer, Instapundit, Drudge Report, and the few other blogs I read on a daily basis. They offer nothing, at all, that isn’t being offered better someplace else.
What’s more, they sure aren’t offering advertising, which was the original intent of the whole thing, to me. Go ahead, click around on their site, is there a “join up” link I missed? The advertising link takes you to a page about how to advertise on their group of “70 influential blogs”, and that’s a great idea and all, except there are already AdSense and BlogAds. Yes, less than ideal, but perfectly servicable solutions for anybody in the long tail who wants to offset costs a little bit.
And that doesn’t even being to cover screwing over former partners. If even a third of what Kenton Kelly says is true, Roger L. Simon is a despicable, odious man with all the moral rectitude of a salamander. His response is, frankly, arrogant and snide. Having read most of the exchange, it seems that Mr. Kelly is often petulant, but I’d be pissed if some hollywood writer basically stole my idea then cut me out of the loop. It also seems like Mr. Simon confuses attacks on the OSM/Pajamas business plan as attacks on himself. Granted Kelly has said some pretty rude, if hilarious, things about Simon, but he’s mostly been on about why the OSM plan is crap. And he’s right.
In trying to create some sort of new Blogozeitgeist the folks at OSM have managed to invent a mish-mash of services that are already available from established brands. I fail to see how they’re going to succeed by offering exactly nothing new to the blogosphere. What’s more, they’ve acted like those dreaded MSM gate-keepers by only inviting certain blogs to join, and having their editor-based front-page. I realize decisions like these are fine considerations in a business venture, and important ones, but it seems counterintuitive that a group of high-power bloggers would get together trying to make money off of blogs by turning out something only vaguely blog-like.
UPDATE: They’re changing their name back.
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* For a website advised by/partnered with a guy who approvingly linked this (largely correct) criticism of GoogleNews back in June, it seems sort of unwise to link stories from the official newswire of a totalitarian state.
