Open Season
Yesterday I wrote "Good night, Pajamas Media; Good morning, Open Source Media," in welcoming the blog conglomerate that launched with a new name.
Maybe I should have written "Good night, Open Source Media." It seems the name is already spoken for.
Boston public radio host Christopher Lydon has been calling his production company that since May. His show is called Open Source.
On the radio Open Source's site yesterday afternoon, staffer Brendon Greeley wrote:
Hm. A company that used to call itself Pajamas Media now calls itself Open Source Media, which is — scroll down to our legal notice — kind of exactly what we call ourselves. ...
Don't get us wrong; we didn't invent the idea of working with bloggers to make media, we certainly didn't invent the concept "open source," and there's plenty of room for everyone to do what we've been doing. But they chose the same name that we established in May and, seeing as how we work in the same industry, people might find that a little confusing. And that has us puzzled.
It takes a while for a new blog to find its voice. Longer than it takes critics to stick their fork in it and pronounce it done.
When the Huffington Post launched in May LA Weekly's Nikki Fine famously declared the celebrity group blog was "such a bomb that it's the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate all rolled into one."
It's been more like Star Wars ever since. Today, about 50,000 readers visit each day to read a list of friends and allies that includes Laurie David, Harry Shearer, Deepak Chopra, Lawrence O'Donnell, David Corn, Michael Smerconish. I've bookmarked the HuffPo in a category called Blinq essentials.
The launch of Open Source Media also has attracted its share of cybersharks.
"The Huffington Post for ugly people," wrote a commenter on Jeff Jarvis's Buzzmachine blog.
Jarvis, the creator of Entertainment Weekly, was less than jazzed:
Pajamas, as I understand it, wanted to be an ad network. I don't see huge advertiser demand for a bunch of mostly conservative political bloggers. At one time, they wanted to be some sort of syndicate but I said nobody would buy content. It seems they now want to be some sort of blog central thing — antimatter to the Huffingtonpost's matter, I suppose — but the difference is that most of her people don't blog while most of these people already do blog so I don't know why I need to see a collection of them.
Karl Martino, founder of Philly Future, objects to the name Open Source but on purist grounds. He was offended that the former Pajamas people had trademarked their new name. He was offended that they don't seem to share the spirit of open media, which allow users to modify programs or encyclopedia entries and contribute to their evolution. (Here's a Wikipedia entry on it.)
Not only do they completely reject all the ideas of open source, they also seem to believe that things like fair use don't exist either. If you want a copyright that that respects the ideals of open source look no farther than mine ... Share and share alike, that is open source.
Nice framing of that. The radio show isn't complaining about the stealing of it's *idea* whatsoever. It posted about it's *name*. And before anyone joins your network, they should realize that your license (http://www.osm.org/site/about/privacypolicy) says this: 2. Our Site and all its contents, which includes, but is not limited to, text, graphics, photographs, logos, video and audio content, is protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under the copyright laws of the United States and other countries. All individual components of Our Site, including, without limitation, articles, content and other elements comprising Our Site are also copyrighted works. Additionally all of the weblogs linked to by us are likewise protected. You must abide by all additional copyright notices or restrictions contained on this site and our linked weblogs. 3. You may not reproduce, distribute, copy, publish, enter into any database, display, modify, create derivative works, transmit, or in any way exploit any part of this site. The only exceptions to this are that you may download material from Our Site for your own personal use, provided such download is limited to making one machine readable copy and/or one print copy that limited to occasional articles of personal interest only. No other use of the content of Our Site is permitted. Please contact our Sales Department if you wish to have rights other than those stated above. The funny thing is that I might have just violated your policy and put Dan at risk of it as well by his republishing of it here in his comments.
I'll risk it.
Harsh. That's totally NOT Creative Commons. Are we allowed to talk about it after we read it? I won't visit, it is obviously playing on a buzz word that might bring in lots of liberal types, only to have them read conservative ideas...
Hundreds of thousands of hits for Arianna is "Star Wars"? Please... her enemy Drudge gets over 10 million hits a day.
10 mil hits, Joe? HuffPo had 1.5 million site visits in September. Drudge had 3 mil. This according to the Vanity Fair profile of her this month. That averages to 50,000 a day, which the piece now says.
Greate, aesthetic site, love it.