California Conservative

We’ve always wanted to use “gate” in something.

This morning, Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds cheerfully reports: GET IT RIGHT THE SECOND TIME: OSM is going back to “Pajamas Media.”

“About time: I liked that better anyway,” confesses Reynolds. “As the Insta-Daughter said, ‘Pajamas sounds cheerful. Open Source Media sounds . . . educational.’”

We concur. Actually, “open source” sounds more IT-related (because it is), and has been a popular buzzword among venture capitalists. Nothing wrong with appealing to investors.

But it appears there’s more behind this story than just branding. Much more.

Since OSM/Pajamas launched with great fanfare last week, the blogosphere has felt a cold draft sweeping across it as many bloggers have expressed their criticisms over the venture. And some say the tension is mounting.

Before the engine has even warmed up, in comments ranging from mere doubt and playful skepticism to outright condemnation, bloggers are weighing in on OSM, the first major attempt to create an official media outlet within the ’sphere.

Dan Riehl asks jestfully, “Is OSM the Anti-Christ?” Certainly not. But as the old saying goes, there’s a little truth in humor.

Don Surber is less reserved than usual: “OSM=MSM — WTF?” He writes:

Am I jealous? Hell yea. I’d love to get a jillion hits a day. But worse, this is chilling. It sucks the oxygen out of the room. Despite its early stumbles, this baby looks headed to be the next Microsoft, AOL or Google.

That’s highly unlikely, but this isn’t about blog envy, anyway. Surber continues:

And already it is acting like the MSM — making bogus claims, making errors, correcting them and then having to correct the correction.
. . .
I am not alone in observing the MSM streak in OSM.

Indeed, he’s not.*

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler barks:

But just what the Heck is OSM?

Is it a feed from a gazillion other blogs? I’ve heard of that, it’s called RSS and I already have a client taking care of mine, I don’t really need duplicates.

Is it an alternative to the main stream media? Great. Except they’re feeding off the MSM just like the rest of us and, as I already mentioned, I already have feeds from my favorite blogs installed.”

PoliBlog tempers the debate:

In short: there is a lot to consider and discuss without being petty or just criticizing for criticism’s sake.

Alas, there’s a disturbance in the Force.

Providing further intrigue and controversy, Dennis The Peasant tells-all, revealing his side of the story: effectively, that the OSM business model was largely his idea, and Roger L. Simon screwed him out of the deal. It’s a juicy report worth reading. While we’re not taking sides, Dan Riehl does.

Cardinal Martini concludes, “Dennis The Peasant has created a situation in which no matter what happens, he, Dennis, is the winner.”

Not a bad position to be in since OSM’s future, like any start-up, is uncertain.

Ann Althouse poses this salient question:

“How could the prominent bloggers who put OSM together have retained so little sense of the spirit of blogging?”

As we read it, this begs two further questions: What defines the “spirit of blogging?” and what are the challenges of OSM’s business model?

Let’s answer the first: Blogging is the wild west online, with boundless territory to be claimed. It is open to all settlers. It is egalitarian and self-policing. It is a meritocracy and it is Darwinistic, a realm in which success is determined and measured by personal creativity to grow readership. This can be done on an individual basis or it can be done as a syndicate, like Gawker Media.

Blogging began like a personal diary, and it’s the spirit of freedom to remain unedited. Can the blogosphere be tamed? Impossible.

How will OSM make a business out of this and what are the challenges?

The success of any media is determined by readership, therefore content is king and eyeballs drive advertising. OSM believes that the “long-tail” of the blogosphere can be leveraged more efficiently through aggregation. In theory, this makes great sense.

OSM has ambitions to reinvent the idea of blog advertising. “Advertising on blogs was a work-intensive system,” OSM founder Roger L. Simon told ClickZ. “There were no corporate ads because it was too time-consuming.”

Too time-consuming for who? The true spirit of blogging is not to be aggregated for commercial purposes, but to be a lone ranger. And, yes, even a cowboy can ride with others. But if corporate ads are going to run on blogs, the content cannot not remain without oversight. And there’s the rub.

As Aaron’s CC: asserts:

“The whole POINT of blogging is decentralization and NOT having editors rape your prose before you publish it, right? Bloggers whose asses doesn’t hold up to fact-checking lose their audiences.”

Indeed, OSM will be playing by different rules. Not saying bad, just different.

Namely, if the business model is — as we believe — to organize and rapidly grow content via a network of participating bloggers in order to sell an aggregated readership (”eyeballs”) to corporate advertisers, OSM will be held accountable, like any other major publisher, to make sure the content does not offend the advertisers. Some controls will be required. Afterall, a media company relies on advertisers for revenue.

It appears that OSM is positioning itself as an advertising broker that’s different than BlogAds — how, exactly, we’re not sure. But in both cases we’re talking about middlemen.

While this infrastructure certainly helps the small blogs, why would the larger ones not work directly with advertisers?

If OSM seeks to be, as they describe, “the new portal to the best of the blogosphere,” then they should try to acquire Technorati, which is the current de facto search engine for the blogosphere. Such an acquisition would be a smart defensive move. In doing so, OSM would be in the position to not only leverage bloggers but funnel millions of readers as well. However, they’ll need to raise a lot more VC money to pull that off.

And what about a subscription model? Who would pay for what you can read for free? Bloggers aren’t charging and, if they do, there will always be others who don’t. The barriers to entry are non-existent. There’s no value, unless there’s some exclusivity — and that’s when things get interesting.

Unlike OSM, by comparison, Gawker has created a syndicate of dedicate blogsites, each focusing on some category of interest, but mostly entertainment. They are managing their own content and creating value by being focused. But they are a classic media company. They’re are not going to write anything that offends their advertisers. And they’re not claiming to be unbiased.

By attempting to commercialize blogging, notably news and politics, OSM must carefully avoid not becoming what created its revolutionary, grassroots appeal to begin with: being the anti-MSM. The lines must never be blurred.

But if they do, we can be sure the blogosphere will expose it and take them down like the next Rathergate.

*Also blogging on the subject:
Anechoic Room
Armed Liberal
Buzz Machine
Conservative Cat
Don Surber
Hog on Ice
Irritainted
The Moderate Voice
One-Handed Economist
Outside The Beltway
Perrero
Random Fate

UPDATE:
StopTheACLU highlights the true “Open Sore Media”
*heh*

Linked to Political Teen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 11:00 am and is filed under Blogging, Capitalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.