"Did what Bill supposedly did really amount to a firing offense or were his accusers just looking for money or fame, as O'Reilly himself has implied?"

"Or was it just a political hatchet job by the seemingly endless legions who spend all their waking hours and seemingly most of their sleeping ones doing their best to oppose, discredit, and destroy all things Trump?"

Asks Roger L. Simon.

Trump has a 10-point plan.

It's a plan. And it has 10-points.

I'll let Roger L. Simon go into the weeds.

Here's the text of the whole speech. I'll just focus on:

End Catch-And-Release....

At Meadhouse, the dialogue was something like:

MEADE: Catch and release?! It's not called "catch and release."

ME: Oh? Hmm. You mean, catch and release is what you do with fish.

Calling it "catch and release" puts it in an interesting light — as if we're catching human beings for sport.

"[T]here are more than a few closet Trump supporters out here in Tinseltown. Some of them may even surface soon."

Says Roger L. Simon in "The #NeverTrump Crowd Should Get a Life," adverting to the Bret Easton Ellis I was talking about — here — the other day.

Simon calls attention to Trump's ability as "a performer... with a wide range" and his stylistic flexibility, which we saw a glimpse of on Tuesday night, as he appeared "against a backdrop that resembled the White House, replete with a proscenium of flags."

I know... a "proscenium" is the arch in front of the stage, the frame.



The flags were — as he said — a backdrop.

But when Trump is President, the common people will have moved to the foreground, and elitists like me who correct your language usage will be the ludicrous fools the people never listened to anyway.

David Brooks heard no "talk of community and compassionate conservatism" at the GOP convention.

It's embarrassing. He really let his bias show when he said:

[T]here is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

As Roger L. Simon points out (via Instapundit):

Hello, where were you, David? On Thursday evening, one after the other private citizen came forth to testify to Mitt Romney’s extraordinary personal charity and deep community spirit. I have never seen anything like it at a convention, Republican or Democrat. I don’t know if you would call it Burkean, but you would certainly call it eminently decent and highly laudable. The culmination was Ted and Pat Oparowsky of New Hampshire who recounted how much time and attention the young Mitt Romney gave their son, a child he did not know, when the boy was dying of cancer.

Maybe Brooks skitters away from the part of the web of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions that is religion.

I'd love to see Brooks write another column and explain — if this is what he thinks — that the compassionate, communitarian activities done within religion don't count as part of a political party's vision for America. Perhaps these activities are like the good things you do for your family and friends. It's a group of insiders, and someone operating within government needs a "vision" that relates to the whole community, not to groups that give each other special treatment.

But I don't think he'll be able to prop up his old Edmund Burke ventriloquist doll to say that. Brooks will need to come out and say it on his own. And then we can judge whether David Brooks represents conservatism (even for NYT op-ed page purposes).

Gingrich implodes.

"Newt Gingrich’s top staff quit en masse Thursday...."

Gingrich was intent on using technology and standing out at debates to get traction while his advisers believed he needed to run a campaign that incorporated both traditional, grassroots techniques as well as new ideas.

One official said the last straw came when Gingrich went forward with taking a long-planned cruise with his wife last week in the Greek isles....

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH said: "Here's Calista Gingrich to tell us what she thinks":



ADDED: Roger L. Simon writes:

Two of the key operatives who just left Gingrich’s staff -Dave Carney and Rob Johnson – have been major advisers to Gov. Rick Perry. Does this mean Perry is about to jump in the presidential race? Sure looks like it.

AND: Callista was the problem! So says Fred Barnes:

Aides to Newt Gingrich have resigned from his presidential campaign in protest of what they felt was a takeover by Callista Gingrich, the candidate’s wife since 2000.

Looks like Dennis has weighed in.

In answer to your first question: So did I. And I never slurped.

The Pajamas Media blogging enterprise has collapsed.

Jeff G. (at Protein Wisdom) has the letter from Roger L. Simon, which buries the bad news in a statement about how Pajamas is turning its attention to its web TV efforts. I wonder how many people watch Pajamas TV. In the comments over there, Showy writes:

Those guys certainly know more about web advertising than I do, but it seems like a strange business decision to me. My first thought on reading this was, “I can’t imagine having less interest in anything than I have in watching ‘Ask Dr. Helen’ or ‘Hugh News’ on my computer”. Not to pick on those two, per se, but it’s true. So I checked the web stats on Alexa, and appeared to me that Protein Wisdom alone had more views over the past 6 months than pjtv.com, the portal for all of their shows (probably a reasonable facsimile for views of all their shows combined). Yet they’re going to dump PW (and presumably others) in order to focus on PJTV? When you factor in that probably a solid half of the readers of these sites are stealth-reading them from work, and that it’s rather harder to stealth-watch a 20 minute video clip, I have a hard time seeing how this is going to work out for them.

Jeff G. retorts:

Maybe I’ll start a free version PJTV. I’m sure I can play all those characters.

I must say, I can barely stand to watch any political talking heads TV shows, even on network TV and cable TV. I just have no patience waiting for people to say something that I could read in 1/10 the time. I've clicked over to PJTV a few times, but after less than a minute, I always leave. Why am I looking at these folks? Put it in writing! Yes, I know I do Bloggingheads, but that's an active conversation for me. Do you watch Bloggingheads? At least with Bloggingheads, I can make whatever little embeddable clips I want to use to set up a discussion in writing.



I'm reading more comments chez Protein Wisdom, and SGT Ted mirrors my thinking:

Well, crapo. The reason I use the intertoobs is because I don’t LIKE the talking heads “we’ll tell you what we think is important and you won’t have any way to respond” Bullshit of TV. If I want TV like programs, I’ll turn on the goddam TV. I like the people doing the PJMTV when they are blogging, but I don’t want to watch them go blah blah.

Instapundit says:

YEAH, the PJM ad-network model isn’t working. I don’t have much to do with the PJM business side, but online ads just aren’t producing revenue like they were a few years ago, and the blog-network thing was apparently a tough sell. Hence the emphasis on PJTV. How will that work out? Stay tuned.

Well, we will, of course, stay tuned to Instapundit for further updates on this and everything else. But do you want to watch him on web TV? I mean, surely you must want to watch him when he's talking to me... or do you? (Hey, that's one of the few times Bloggingheads put me on the left.)

Ace, another PJM blogger who's about to lose his income stream, says:

Damn. I was finally starting to make an amount of money I wasn't utterly embarrassed by, too....

[T]he model for payment was pretty transparent and intuitive -- paid per impression. One could figure out one's quarterly payment just by eyeballing one's Sitemeter. BlogAds paid okay, but there are always those patches where no one really wants to buy ads, making income kind of unpredictable.

This is one of those patches. I usually have 2 or 3 ads running via BlogAds, but haven't even had 1 ad in the last couple of weeks. You can see why BlogAds is a less risky business. It doesn't pay you because you have traffic. It pays you because they sold an ad to run on your blog. How much does it pay? When I sell an ad, it pays me a percentage of the price I set myself (and can adjust up or down as I see fit). (Feel free to buy an ad!)

Some of you long-time readers may remember that I rejected my offer from Pajamas Meda back when it started:

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.

Will Henry take them back?

I did some pretty harsh anti-Pajamas blogging back in the day. (Including stuff aimed at Jeff G. Remember when I wrote what my old commenter Icepick said was "that the grossest thing Ann has written on this blog"?) It was a huge ideological issue for me at the time: the freedom and independence of bloggers. Looking back on those old posts, I can see I've lost some of my lively romanticism about blogging. I had a very intense feeling about how subversive this all was. That somehow went hand in hand with the anticipation of waves of money flowing in — and who would channel more of it to me, Henry or Roger?

But these are hard times for everyone. Any business could fail in this environment. So, what does it say about how good that business model was in the first place? My concern was always, which business model is better for us writers, and I thought it was Henry.

ADDED: The Anchoress — a PJM blogger — weighs in... and, as one of several reasons why she doesn't want to do web TV, reveals that "the Lord’s overgenerous endowment in my chestal area makes any notion of camera work unthinkable, particularly in HD where the girls might terrify some." How large do breasts need to be before they make it impossible to appear on television? And can't you just adjust the camera frame? On Bloggingheads, we're all just heads — and maybe a bit of shoulders — unless, of course, you're Arianna Huffington:



UPDATE: I'm still waiting for Dennis the Peasant — PJM's biggest antagonist — to join the conversation, so let's read that other relentless Pajamas antagonist, Steve from Hog on Ice:

This is probably what’s going on: PJM always lost money, so it was paying people out of venture capital. As the capital dissipated, people had to be fired.

PJM’s new hope is PJTV, a pay video site. Where you can pay to watch Glenn and Helen Reynolds. This is not unlike asking people to pay to be punched in the face. It will fail. I can’t understand why anyone would think it could succeed....

I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse.

Go to the link for his curse theory. It includes Obama and the GOP and the G-O-D. He ends with Biblical verse:

Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!

I keep telling myself to go cook breakfast, and I'm taking this as a sign.

"Ann has her reasons, discernible in a parsing of her own comments following her post..."

I'm not sure if I like that or not. On the one hand, Sissy Willis, not bothering with my reasons, rolls along, lavishing praise on the project she has already bound herself to. ("Roger L. Simon is a genius.") On the other hand, it does encourage her readers to click over to this blog.

And those reasons of mine have to do with not wanting to be put in the position of needing to defend and promote a group project that I can't control.

Incidentally, the University of Wisconsin Law School is the greatest law school in the land!

The Pajamas Media Discussion Board.

Here. Set up by Laurence Simon, whose nerve I've recently praised. Now everyone can blogjam about the Pajamas Entity.

UPDATE: Over on the discussion board, someone named Louis Sifer writes "Honestly, I think Lou Minatti is Ann Althouse. Honest. It's my honest opinion. I detect the same writing style." What do you think are the chances that I would want to hide my writing under a pseudonym, and then what do you think are the chances that I'd come up with the name "Lou Minatti"? Now, I'm just giggling over the keyboard, which you might picture me doing a lot, but, in fact, I hardly ever do. But this Lou Minatti character seems pretty smart. The thread is limited to constructive criticism for Pajamas, and he's got:

Anyway, they need to turn it off. Now. Just shut it off.

Then sit down and ask what it is they're trying to do. Why not ask us, the readers? I can't recall anyone (Charles, Roger, Glenn) asking us for our ideas. It's their money of course, but it's like they just assumed that they would know what we wanted to look at.

Is PJM a blog aggregator? A competitor to Huffington? What is it? To this day I still do not know what PJM is, and I still haven't bookmarked it because it's guilty of the worst sin of all - there's nothing interesting to read there!

They need to get a clear idea of what they are. Until then, they are wasting time and money.

Ooh, I think Althouse adopted an unlikely pseudonym so she could make it look like someone else agreed with her and then link to "him" back on her blog. And she's probably also that Louis Sifer character too, using "him" to make the whole thing about her. She's an attention whore. Yeah, Louis Sifer, Lou Minatti -- I detect the same pseudonym-inventing style! Lou... Louis... her dad's name is probably Lou. Get the fedora'd detectives on this, quick!

Althouse-o-phobia seeps in the collective mind of the Pajama Entity, where the horrifying words echo:

They need to turn it off. Now. Just shut it off.

"Did Roger Simon Form a Partnership With Dennis the Peasant?"

Entrepreneurship lawprof Gordon Smith does some analyzing

The story bears a striking resemblance to the facts of Urban Decay, where a California appellate court held that two women who developed ideas for a cosmetics company had formed a partnership.

When you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.

Thanks, Steven.

UPDATE: "Looks like they’re backing away like Murtha from the war," says Jeff Jarvis (who, like Steven Taylor, links to these posts from David Corn and Glenn Reynolds).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dennis the Peasant tells his version of the history of the founding of OSM, in a post that could have been titled "The Revenge of Jethro Bodine." MORE: Dennis's previous post is on point too, and unlike the later one has a comments section.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Atrios has unleashed the commenters on Roger. I can almost empathize. It's actually a good opportunity to compare the behavior of lefty and righty commenters. The lefties, in this sample, are all over the place, in "open thread" mode, despite the assigned topic.

Elsewhere in the the left blogo-hemisphere, Kos inflicts a different kind of pain. Noting, as I have, that frequently nearly all of the headlines displayed at OSM are from Xinhua News Agency -- "the official propaganda mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party" -- Kos quips: "So, um, did OSM's $3.5 million in venture funds come from the Chinese government?" When the first commenter doesn't get the joke of his title ("OSM is Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece"), Kos explains that he's joking and adds, cogently:

[This is t]he kind of kink they should've worked out before their all-too-public launch.

That's why I'm a big fan of soft-launches. Quietly launch, work out the kinks with the help of early adopters, and then make your big splash announcement.

Yes. I really cannot fathom the thinking behind opening big with what little they had. Was it hubris? Sheer recklessness?

MORE: Funniest Kos comment: "They stole Cialis's logo." I knew that spit curl looked familiar. Spit curl. It's this. I'm not bodily-fluids blogging again. My bodily fluids post of the day was here. And what a nutty photo on Cialis's page [when I visited]. The man's hand is in the nose-thumbing position, and the couple seems to have a relationship that is the furthest thing from sexual. But I guess that's their pitch: "If a playful moment turns into the right moment, you can be ready." Nice marketing, really, encouraging guys to take the drug "just in case." Why would OSM invoke Cialis imagery? They've got a website up, "just in case," somewhere down along the line, they have something to write.

YET MORE: Dan at Riehl World View has some serious questions for Roger L. Simon:

From what I've read of Kelly [AKA Dennis the Peasant], he has attacked OSM, ... [b]ut it appears you are dodging legitimate ethics questions by suggesting it's only personal.... You asked this Dennis to share his ideas and after going quite a ways down the road with him and hitting on some new, perhaps even better ones, you simply dropped him? Is that true? Come on, Roger - you're better than this. At least I hope you are.

It's too shrewd by half for you to now say no contracts were signed. This isn't fiction writing you're into now, Roger. OSM is supposed to be about reporting credible information. If the CEO of OSM is going to kick the thing off by saying, hey, don't mind my hand shakes, they don't amount to anything, it's an ominous start.

In the end, no one cares about Kelly - if he is out, he's out. But you have started and are by design now the purported leader of a serious new venture. Might I suggest you start acting like one? Either get serious, or go back to playing around with a less than wealth enhancing blog like the rest of us.

AND EVEN MORE: Jeff Jarvis amused me with this:

Yet Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, promises this — with more haughtiness than I’d ever heard from Dan Rather — on its prevaricating post about the name:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere.

Oh, gag me with a mitre.

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

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

ON REREADING: To that last question, why did great bloggers lose the spirit of blogging? Perhaps, it was that they wanted to expand beyond blogging and had to leave blogging behind to pursue their ambitions. Oddly, lots of people trusted them to become business managers because they were good bloggers, but the enterprise involved sloughing off the blogger's attitude. Indeed, there was never any reason to think that because a person is good at blogging he'd be good at business.

"They're acting like CBS did last year after bloggers (like Charles!) proved the TNG memos were frauds. It's really uncanny."

Steven Den Beste commenting chez Dennis the Peasant. "It's a bad sign when they start editing the past, in this case by deleting the previous 'name defense' post." A later commenter adds: "Someone needs to do an animated overlay of OSM's original 'trademark' post v. the newer revised version. Alert the media!"

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.

Taking off the Pajamas: now, what do you see?

Kevin Alwyrd is present at the revelation of Open Source Media, the erstwhile Pajamas Media, and he's a little distracted (by one of the speakers), but he "still [doesn't] completely get it." He links to Mike Krempasky ("It’s a pretty flashy event - but I don’t think they’ve done much to explain their business to the attendees") and Jeff Jarvis ("Now I’m even more confused").

Jeff Goldstein is live- fake-blogging the event beginning with a trip to the hotel bar:

I found Tim Blair, Roger Simon, and Ed Driscoll bunched around a small table near the restrooms. Ed and Roger were nursing Gibsons, while Tim (who at 5’1" is much shorter than I thought he’d be) was drinking what looked to be IPA out of a pilsner glass inscribed with the legend, "Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas." "Heh, cool," I said, motioning to Tim’s glass. "You have those made up for the launch?" "What do you think, genius?" Blair asked, not looking up. "I maybe had it printed up special for myself?"

Would you drink a fluid out of something that said "Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas"? I think of bodily fluids. But no matter, now the bloggers can do it in their Open Source Media. Or as somebody already quipped: Open Sores Media. Swapping semen for pus, bodily fluids-wise.

UPDATE: Did they notice the "Open Sores" pun? I see that back in June, Roger L. Simon raised the question of what to rename Pajamas, and "Open Source" came up in the second comment, got repeated a few times, and then drew this:

Open Sores News--
"Band Aiding the World"

So they had to know the joke was there.

But what do you think of the new Open Source site? Is it fun to use and workable? I notice a lot of flabbiness in the writing. The home page currently features this block of text to draw us into the blog opinion on a top news story:

The historic Gaza border deal reached yesterday between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor), brokered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in marathon negotiations, has been received by the blogosphere with a far greater amount of skepticism than it has where the mainstream media are concerned. Blogger Joshuapundit seems quite unhappy: he says that Israel was pressured by Rice, the Eurooean Union's Javier Solana and Middle East special envoy John Wolfensohn to accept the agreement with little, if any, safeguards. The deal, whose full text can be found at the State Department website, would allow Palestinian authorities to take control of the border between the Gaza strip and Israel, notably in Rafah, and would open links with the West Bank. Both Time and the Washington Post have all the behind the scenes details on how the agreement was reached. War to Mobilize Democracy is "nervous" about security, but notes that the deal will ease the international pressure on Israel; Heavy-Handed Politics write that history makes them simply skeptical. On the other side, Anything They Say not only cautiously welcomes the new situation, but is pleasantly surprised by Rice's deal making skills, at least compared with her "terrible performance as National Security Advisor."

"Has been received by the blogosphere with a far greater amount of skepticism than it has where the mainstream media are concerned"? You'd think they'd write their very first sentence crisply!

And why should anyone care what these bloggers think? Who are they? Unless you're already sold on blogging, the teasers are laughable: "Blogger Joshuapundit seems quite unhappy," "War to Mobilize Democracy is 'nervous,'" Anything They Say "is pleasantly surprised."

There's nothing snappy or exciting in any of that, no sense that these bloggers are likely to come out with anything more interesting than whoever was sitting next to you in the living room where you watched the evening news.

"Eurooean," "Heavy-Handed Politics write" -- so much for professionalizing the image of blogging.

And this on the day when you are asking for attention, trying to hook new people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If I were an insider to OSM, would I mock them like this? Isn't much of the value of bloggers that we are on the outside? Rolling up together in a group to make money -- is that worth the sacrifice of independence? Everyone who signed on is now stuck with the presentation on that website that we were not able to see when we were asked to sign on to 18-month commitments.

STILL MORE: I'm told Jeff Goldstein wasn't even at the OSM launch, which surprises me, because I began reading it on the OSM home page under their heading "live-blogging." That's an awfully strange way to introduce people to their service. Aren't ordinary people being asked to trust the OSM portal?

Also, Charles Johnson linked to this post to note my bad taste -- the "fluids" wisecrack -- and this set off his commenters who just started wildly insulting me -- hilariously assuming I'm a big lefty and using lots of bad taste insults against me. How does that make sense? If they are outraged at my bad taste, as Charles suggests they be, then why aren't the comments primly proper? They must be insulting me because they assume I'm a lefty. Ha, ha. Somebody tell Armando! Anyway, Charles's fans end up hurting him on the day when he is trying to make an impression as an elder statesman of blogging, by making his site look all trashy. And the irony is priceless: he is complaining about my bad taste. Yet "semen" and "pus" are both perfectly sound English words, not slang at all, and pointing out literary images is quite high tone.

AND NOW THIS: Wonkette links, and it's not to the semen-pus thing.

THURSDAY MORNING: One day after the launch, Jeff Goldstein's fake-live-blogging is still the only blog post quoted on the home page, under the heading "BEST OF THE BLOGS." In all this time, that's all they've found? The highlighted post ends with this line: "Or as my friend Bill Bixby once said to a French prostitute (god rest his soul), 'bonjour, you plump little tart!'" How they can think it's a good idea to open the site with such writing? Who does that appeal to? And if it didn't appeal to you yesterday morning, but you kept going back to give them another chance, what would you think? The site is stupefyingly inactive and as yet devoid of sharp commentary. There is only this obscure insider humor about the founders of the site getting drunk and talking about a prostitute.

The unpajama'd Jarvis.

Jeff Jarvis is talking about Pajamas Media here and here. He's especially stirred up about their choice of Judith Miller as the keynote speaker at their new-name-unveiling event. But he also doesn't get their business model. And, like me, after blogging negatively about PM, he got a phone call from Roger L. Simon. Now, Joe Gandelman is picking up the Jarvis-Pajamas story. Joe, is that your phone ringing?

More pajama talk.

Scott Lemieux asks a very good question about Pajamas Media ads and the blogger's supposed veto power. I was wondering that myself.

On the positive side of the Pajamas debate, Pieter Dorsman is willing to put his trust in Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon, based on their reputation as bloggers. He writes:

It’s always difficult to take a risk on early stage ventures but in general you buy into a concept or technology and the people behind it....But then the question is: do you want to take the risk that PM will not succeed? What if they do? Do you think PM will return to you with an offer down the road if you declined them today? There are no quick and definite answers here and the PM team probably doesn’t have them either. The point is that some bloggers have been asked to come on board at an early stage, be part of a journey that may well end up in a completely different place.

The best deals should be offered to the first people who sign up, because they are agreeing to the unknown, but the deals are not good enough to compensate for the year long commitment for anyone with decent BlogAds income. I'm not going to worry about missing the boat without being more sure of the boat. Dorsman concedes the "journey" is unknown. And remember the commitment is for a year. Who knows what better deals may emerge in six months? The strange emphasis on a long commitment might suggest that there is a rival enterprise on the horizon. If nothing else, there's the coming BlogAds upgrade. Maybe I want to be free to catch the next boat.

But do I think only the early adopters will get deals or even that they will get the best deals? No! I think if Pajamas is successful, they'll want to sign on more people, especially the people who are now most likely to hold out: those who are doing well with BlogAds, because we are the more popular, established bloggers. At this later point, Pajamas will be more of a known quantity, more worth dealing with. And with all the eager early adopters signed on to year-long deals (or 18-month deals), Pajamas will be free to offer much nicer deals to the holdout crowd. Why shouldn't they want us? Maybe they'll be pissed at me in particular, for criticizing them right when they were trying so hard to get started, but on the other hand, they could say even our harshest critic has signed on.

UPDATE: Who knows what better deals will emerge tomorrow?

UPDATE 2009: The collapse of Pajamas Media for bloggers.

"The Plame Rove Affair is One of the Biggest Wastes of Time of My Lifetime..."

I'm just browsing around the blogs this morning, and I see Roger L. Simon is saying exactly what I'm thinking.

But look on the bright side. A story like that filling the news signifies the absence of a bigger story to wipe if off the front page. How well I remember the summer we couldn't stop talking about Chandra Levy and Gary Condit.

ADDED: But there is something shameful about the way the London bombings have not fully engaged our attention. And, yes, I do realize that promoters of the Plame-Rove story will say it's all so connected.