Y'know - I actually hope I'm wrong in my dot-bombish skepticism. A successful OSM would be beneficial to blogging on the whole.

However I just see too many size 9 outgoing money pipelines ... and one incooming size 2 incoming pipeline. Meaning, it's going to take one heck of alot of advertising revenue without some form of product and/or services upsales and renewals.

Iowahawk explains the whole thing at The Blockbuster OSM Deal: What You Need to Know

I don't think I'll ever figure La Shawn out. Back in one of her October posts she quoted (without attribution) my suggestion that it might have been good to have her on a panel at the God Blog Convention. When someone else pointed out to her that it might be proper to credit whose post contained the quote and what blogs they came from (Connexions and Benediction Blogs On), she simply deleted my quote.

Now to the main issue, though -- this really doesn't sound very open source to me.

If La Shawn put as much energy in touting Christ as she does in promoting herself, well now that would be something for the world of evangelism. That said, La Shawn has her gifts and graces.

La Shawn goes to great lengths to delete any and all opposing, negative or lukewarm comments and trackbacks, so your story doesn't surprised me. She even made sure to delete the trackback from this post.

Her narcissism never ceases to amaze me. In each post is veiled self-praise and whines of being left out of panels, links, or groups. I stopped reading it a while ago but I noticed this "OSMTM" post linked from somewhere else and couldn't resist commenting on it.

I don't know enough about LaShawn Barber to actually comment on her work. On the other hand, I do know about Black people and why at times they seem to be so narcassistic in the pursuit of self-promotion. That's because as the racial minority group -- and especially the minority among conservatives, liberatrians and the like -- there is the need to stand out and get all the credit you deserve because the thought is that no one will give it to you if you don't. For Blacks, letting others take the credit for anything is almost always never the best career move.

The problem in always taking credit and tooting one's own horn constantly is that it can also be very limiting in future prospects. Most people don't like anyone who takes self-promotion beyond a tasteful minimum and besides, it just leaves one vulnerable to a nice hard fall. Besides the key to success in the long run is to let others give you the credit, giving others the credit for your success in return and just shutting up and letting the results speak for themselves. LaShawn will eventually learn that one way or the other.

As for Open Source: As someone who knows a number of the Open Source/Pajamas Media folk, including Cathy Seipp (a remarkable woman by the way), I hope their venture works out. But I'm not sure that this venture and the Andrew Sullivan deals, like the launch of dotcoms such as Pets.com in the 1990s, doesn't herald the decline of blogging as a 'cool' and revolutionary phenomenon, if it ever was.

"Libertarians" not "liberatrians," although the later actually might be a far better name to call my ideological allies.

You may also be interested in seeing the not-too-complimentary views of Dennis the Peasant, who at one time had been involved in the early stages of Pajamas Media / OSM.

One aspect of this I find odd from a business point of view personal attack tact taken on by those bearing the brunt of criticisms on the OSM side.

Not that the delivery side hasn't been all that kind - still, in terms of the blogsphere, isn't some rough play part of the landscape?

Moreover, what are all them conservatives doing playing the victim card?

Plus see this Slashdot post on how they tried to take the (domain) name of a radio show and had to backpedal at least twice on what really happened after they got called on it. The slashdot link above is useful primarily for links. The radio show "Open Source" website w/ more info, is found here

Call me cynical, but this reminds me of the dot.com bubble, or all the hype about XML we started hearing in the 90s that has yet to happen. Or the dot.NET furor, which also didn't turn out to be what MS claimed it would.

And from what I see from others involved, it sounds like it will go under pretty fast.

My betting is the VC guys will pull their $$$ by Friday.