His Majesty has really, really been trying to do his damndest to keep out of the Pajamas Media Open Source Media brou-ha-ha, and for very good reasons too:

I don’t have a dog in that hunt. I’m not in the least bit pissed off at being “passed over”, because I never was passed over. I didn’t ever bother to apply for membership in this new club, even though it was quite open to everybody, so I wasn’t “scorned” in any way. I didn’t apply because I don’t much care for cliques and, just as importantly, because I feel that if you sign up for something, you have an obligation to contribute, and I have an in-built aversion against making promises that I’m not sure that I can keep. Besides, I love blogging because it lets me say whatever the heck I want to whenever I want. I’m very grateful that it seems to strike a chord with so many people and I can’t even begin to describe how grateful I am for all of the friendships I’ve made as a result of it, friendships that have pulled me through some pretty horrid times, to say the very least, friends that I wouldn’t swap for all the gold in the world and friends that I probably would have never made if it wasn’t for my compulsion to blog. But I still blog because I love it, because it’s who I am, and I’m vain enough to think that that’s one of the main reasons that you guys and gals bother to read my drivel, not because I’m a member of some exclusive club. I’m me, and what you get is what I am.

Anyway, I’m not feeling scorned by Open Source Media. If I were, it’d be my own damn fault, so scratch that.

Also, we have a lot of friends who are contributors to OSM, and the last thing we’d want would be to wish them ill.

Just so’s to get the obvious “you’re just envious” and “sour grapes” nonsense out of the way. I wish OSM well, and I hope that they make a trillion dollars and fundamentally change news or whatever their mission statement happens to be at the moment.

And that’s the problem.

What the Hell IS their mission statement?

Take one of my most recent additions to the blogroll, WatchingAmerica.com, they’ve got a mission: To expose the foreign press by translating their native screeds into English. Or the excellent Milblogging.com, who’ve made it their mission to make it easy for the rest of us to find blogs by members of the military. Or Stop the ACLU, keeping an eye on the ACLU’s every move. They all have a mission. You don’t have to have one to be excellent, a lot of my compulsive reads don’t, but I know what they’re about, which is what I always thought was at the center of any business (not suggesting that any of those sites are a business).

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.

Oh well, they managed to gather up $3.5 million in venture capital, so who am I to argue with success?

I don’t care. As I already said, I wish them all the best of luck, but could they at least spend some of that moulah on people who actually know what they’re doing? Having a free party in the Rainbow Room at the “W” is all very nice, I’d be lying if I pretended to say that I wouldn’t have liked to be there, but maybe somewhere along the line it would’ve been a good idea to spend $50 to get a college kid to check out if your new corporate name was already taken? If you’d done that, you wouldn’t have ended up with utter crap like this.

The way this looks, the entire venture capital pot may very well end up going to the actual owners of the OSM trademark, unless they turn out to be a lot nicer than they have to be.

That’s just incompetent.

I had a perfect example of this in school overseas. Some moron company decided to launch in my then home country and decided that hiring a professional who actually spoke the language to do the paperwork just wasn’t worth it.

They got taken to the cleaners and had to file for bankruptcy a few months later, all because of a minor translational error.

Anyway, back on topic: If only OSM would acknowledge that they effed up in their choice of name, I’m sure there wouldn’t be a problem. Stubbornly insisting that they’ve done nothing wrong when they’ve clearly made a mistake that would get a freshman econ student kicked out of class is not going to help. You fucked up, so what? We all do. Own up to it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 2:24 am and is filed under Blogs and Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.