IN THE COMMENTS: Someone links to this recent post by Roger L. Simon, and it makes me say:
Yeah, I read that post of Roger's. It is incredibly whiny. The identification with Judith Miller is laughable. The expressions of weakness with respect to the organization he took a pile of money to run are reckless. How would you feel if you were one of the investors?
Poor, sensitive Roger? Let me remind you once again that Simon telephoned me when I first criticized the Pajamas offer that was emailed to me. He bullied me in the most unbelievably patronizing tone of voice, then, when I tried to express how I felt about blogging, said "Nice to talk to you" and hung up on me. He totally did not impress me as a sensitive sort of person, though he is playing that role in that post of his. I'm sure he feels terrible about his project. But the notion that bloggers shouldn't criticize it, when they had a flashy launch party, is beyond absurd.
And now we should hold back to spare Roger's feelings? Should we have worried about hurting Dan Rather's feelings too?
Suddenly, I feel like writing a post titled: "What's the Frequency, Roger?"
UPDATE: I just looked back at the original post I did about rejecting the Pajamas Media offer. It's very short and light, but it does try to express the feeling I have about blogging:
Did you get your offer from Pajamas Media yet? Are you going to put on the pajamas -- take a flat fee to commit the top four spots on your sidebar for a whole year? I thought Pajamas implied a bloggy freedom, different from a corporate, mainstream mentality. Are we supposed to marry Pajamas and give up on Henry Copeland's delightful BlogAds, which has been beautifully designed with a feeling for the spirit of blogging? Ah, I don't like pajamas anyway. I want to blog naked. With Henry.This is what led Roger to lay into me over the telephone and then hang up on me. That's all I would have written, had he not called me and acted like that. I was trying to spare them. After the phone call, I wrote this, analyzing the Pajamas offer in detail. And so it became one of my regular subjects.
Posts
22 comments:
And it keeps getting worse!
http://www.radioopensource.org/index.php
Even the Correction The Media Formerly Known as Pajamas issued is wrong!
Hell, at this rate I'm going to run out of exclamation points....
Do any of their member blogs actually have any OSM-sponsored ads running yet? I've checked out quite a few of their "OSM Blogs", and haven't seen anything but Google, Blog Ads, and self-promotional spots.
Oh, and if you look at the link for the OSM ads on their own page, they're still using "pajamas media" as their affiliate name for the realmedia ads they're serving up!
Neil had this comment at the post Ann links to:
Do I detect a hint of... KERNING?!
Apropros of nothing, can I add this entry to the new banner non-contest, contest
"Prof. Althouse, full of fluids. . . .and truth" -XWL
And over at Roger L. Simon's site he posted a lengthy (and most probably heartfelt as well as mostly gracious) piece about his dismay over the heated rhetoric and how tough it is to be a semi-public figure.
Many commenters seem to have taken this to be a call to slag Althouse a little more (though not in lizardoid sized doses)
So far that site hasn't impressed me, Drudge is still fine for headlines and Instapundit still has the blogroll and links and Slate still has some interesting essays (plus Huffington Post is good for the occaisonal laugh), so why would I add OSM to the rotation?
I like many of the affliates of OSM and they do have some talent there, but trying to compete in the portal business seems misplaced (portals are soooo 1999)
XWL: Yeah, I read that post of Roger's. It is incredibly whiny. The identification with Judith Miller is laughable. The expressions of weakness with respect to the organization he took a pile of money to run are reckless. How would you feel if you were one of the investors?
Poor, sensitive Roger? Let me remind you once again that Simon telephoned me when I first criticized the Pajamas offer that was emailed to me. He bullied me in the most unbelievably patronizing tone of voice, then, when I tried to express how I felt about blogging, said "Nice to talk to you" and hung up on me. He totally did not impress me as a sensitive sort of person, though he is playing that role in that post of his. I'm sure he feels terrible about his project. But the notion that bloggers shouldn't criticize it, when they had a flashy launch party is beyond absurd.
And now we should hold back to spare Roger's feelings? Should we have worried about hurting Dan Rather's feelings too?
I did worry about Dan Rather's feelings.
Still do.
New entry for the non-contest contest:
"This time it's personal" -XWL
(how many movie sequels used that line?)
Guess the good Prof. didn't like the previous quote, oh well.
It's early yet, hopefully the OSM crowd will prove agile and realize they aren't a substitute MSM, just a collection of observers many of whom make good points from time to time.
As they ramp up maybe they will become the counter to AP that they hope to be, but the transition will be painful or laughable if they pretend to be that already while they are still far from the prize.
(like watching a 4 year old pretending to be a pop-star, cute if you are already attached to the kid, painful or laughable otherwise)
Aaron: "ProfA: Are you really miffed about being hustled off the phone by someone from Hollywood?"
No, I'm not miffed. I'm just capable of keeping track of the evidence of what sort of a person I am dealing with. He excluded the information that did not fit with his plan. He was naive enough to imagine that others would fit into his plan and had no independent agency. He had no sense of whom he was talking to. I'll bet he didn't know I was a 54-year-old law professor. I'll bet he thought I was a young woman who could be intimidated. I saw what sort of person he was and how he thought about himself. He didn't think it would be noticed. His little poor-me routine now is quite something.
"...So, you were wasting his time by talking about what blogging means to you. He should have gotten off the phone without pissing you off. If he wanted to see if a quick phone call could change your mind it doesn't necessarily make him a jerk or insensitive."
He had the beginning of an idea, but it didn't take into account that I might actually be an individual with ideas of my own. When his original conception of the phone call didn't happen, he had nothing. He was at the end of his rope. Kind of like he is right now with his I-am-Judith-Miller whimper.
""The idea that he should have tried to tinker with his business plan to accommodate you is a recipe for disaster. Unless everyone was telling him the same things you were and he couldn't close enough deals to get the thing launched change seems like it would be pointless. Should he change his plan for you? And then when he calls Eduwonk who wants another concept change come back to you with yet another concept and so on and so on."
Oh, Aaron, don't you think right now he wishes he'd at least been polite? This is a man without resources, with one idea and an inflated head about how well it would work, and then, when things didn't go as planned, he had nothing. He just begged for mercy. On me, he hung up. But he can't hang up on the dogged world that keeps looking at his godawful website.
But we were toasting ourselves at the Rainbow Room! And now, I'm hungover and tired. Please, leave me alone.
Again and again, I think: how does this look to the investors who gave them $3.5 million?
The saddest thing about this is seeing professional adults participating in the kind of dramabombs I used to only see on LiveJournal.
I expected better from the likes of Johnson and Simon. More fool me.
"Gee, it's tough being a citizenjournalistbusinesspersonprophet. Whyever didn't I see that it would be this cotton-pickin' hard?
And "why-is-everybody-always-pickin' on me"? (First time I've thought of THAT song in a long time.)
I've really been agnostic to apathetic about the whole OSM thing since I literally have zero dog in this hunt and have, in fact, never bought into the whole citizen-journalist thing AS such to begin with. (But then, I don't think the so-called MSM is such a lockstepping monolith either, assuming you acknowledge the ENTIRE universe that it actually encompasses).
And while I love bloggers and think they are a TREMENDOUSLY valuable and important addition to the mix, I've never bought into the idea that they, either independently or as a consortium, could or--more important--should replace more traditional forms of journalism, however flawed.
But all that said, this really has been a pathetic display, so much so that, I'm annoyed to say, I've rather been forced to pay closer attention than I wanted to.
WHAT a fizzytwizit! Talk about one's *** hangin' in the breeze, white and goosebumpy for all to see.
First Roger Simon cries "no more!' to the rough tone that he and plenty of the OSM bloggers have perpetuated, then one of the comments on his site says "But when Bush-hate erupted into the open it was the end of the illusion of civil discourse."
Are these people nuts? Have they ever listened to Rush Limbaugh? Were they asleep for the entire Clinton presidency? Civil discourse ended a looong time ago, and they've been happy to ride the wave. Their sincerity is very much in doubt.
According to Dennis the Peasant, Simon was offended because DtP wasn't gracious about being screwed. According to Ann, he bullied her and insulted her, then dismissed her. Now he's Mr. Judy Miller, playing the kid-card by using his daughter as a flame shield and sympathy generator to compel readers to ease up and stop writing mean things about his CEOness that Miss Simon might stumble across inadvertantly.
I am surprised at how shameless he has turned out to be. Playing the kid-card should be way down on the list of last-ditch efforts.
playah grrl said...
certainly i don't expect a retraction on your scurrilous speculations, but could we at least leave off the whining about how it really is trademark infringement until RadioOpenSource weighs in?
And that goes for you too, Steven-kun.
10:53 AM, November 17, 2005
PG, RadioOpenSoure has weighed in, basically calling "bullshit" on the PJM claims about the origin of the name OSM(tm). The ORIGINAL Open Source Media, Inc has published and linked to a great deal of supporting evidence showing quite clearly that PJM is acting in at best a confused and haphazard manner, and at worst in an Orwellian and decietful manner.
Now that we see that it is Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson that are in the wrong, care to rethink your support of their position? Or are the facts even relevant to you?
Is there anything the OSM offers that the Command Post didn't already have as of April, 2003? Apart from the ad network, CP offered a world wide network of bloggers, cross posting, and editing the main page of CP.
All w/o requiring $4M.
I suspect this really is pissing off the CP founders. It should be.
The question then, is how long until CP offers their own ad network as well?
Ann, you should speak to the CP folks and help them design an ad network that takes the best features of blogads (and OSM if there are any best features to be had there....)
Also, does anyone know of:
A) Death Pool for OSM?
B) A pool for when Roger posts a link to OSM from his blog's front page?
C) Death pool to pick when and who the first OSM dropout will be?
Ann, there's a way to let the readers go directly to this comment permalink link of yours.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/11/theyre-acting-like-cbs-did-last-year.html#113236012633002480
just add the letter "c" before the pound sign and the number combination like this.
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/11/theyre-acting-like-cbs-did-last-year.html#c113236012633002480
see the bolded "c"? now readers can go directly to your comments. neat no?
(and something that blogger.com should fix in the future, so bloggers don't have to add the "c" themselves.)
If Mrs. Simon was commenting on the kerfuffle, she wasn't dragged into anything.
Aaron: I'm describing a phone call Simon made to me. I had blogged about how I didn't think Pajamas made a good offer. He chose to call me, bully me, refuse to listen to me, and hang up on me. So your point that I could take or leave a fixed offer is irrelevant. Understand the context. I'd already rejected the offer and he called me because he didn't want me to say anything negative about Pajamas. But I'm a blogger. Why shouldn't I say what I think? Then he treated me badly in the phone call. How dumb is that? It caused me to write a much more detailed post analyzing the offer.
And "independent agency" isn't a place, it's a quality. It means that individuals act on their own and can't be controlled. I had independent agency in the sense that Roger couldn't control what I wrote, how I responded to the offer, or how I responded to the phone call. He didn't seem to understand the first thing about human behavior. You'd think a novelist would understand such things. But I guess mystery novels....
Hey, I did that comparison hours and hours ago, tho it was with the original corrected overlaid vs. the weird error message now given. So I get half credit. Woot!
This is the, what, second time you've announced your impending departure, playagrrrrrrl?
Why don't you make good on your word this time.
"Ann just blocked my comment"-- what are you talking about? I don't even know what that means, let alone how to do it.
Anyway, I read Baldilock's post and left a comment over there. She, like our new troll, is misreading my "Can I get a feminist?" post.
I'll leave her alone when she apolos.
Apologizes? I bet that'll be a cold day in hell--at least I jolly well hope so.
Hey Anne! I hope you're back soon, and I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving
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