Jeff Jarvis, again at Buzz Machine: “Taking the Pajamas Off”

Now I’m even more confused about Pajamas Open Source Media. I just tuned in from Munich to their Rockefeller Center event and they’re into a panel about fashion. The first person says she doesn’t blog and thinks blogging is absurd and never reads them and is liberal and feels like Ann Coulter in a room of Democrats. What is it with the fashion? How is this going to be open source? What did they need $3.5 million for once the lunch is paid for? Oh, and by the way, are they paying Judy Miller to speak? What’s it all about, Alfie?

Yahoo News has the story as well:

A media Web site scheduled to debut Wednesday will seek to blend traditional journalism with the freeform commentary developed through the emerging Web format known as blogs.

Some 70 Web journalists, including Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds and David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation magazine, have agreed to participate in OSM — short for Open Source Media.

OSM will link to individual blog postings and highlight the best contributions, chosen by OSM editors, in a special section. Bloggers will be paid undisclosed sums based on traffic they generate.

Wired News has some thoughts from OSM’s founders in its story “Will Pajamas Media Wake Up Blogs?”

“It will be the best of mainstream media and best of blog media, side by side, sometimes fighting, sometimes agreeing,” said Roger Simon, a novelist and blogger who co-founded Pajamas Media.

The site aims to be “a whole online news service of bloggers from all over the world,” said Simon. With a list of contributors that reads like a who’s who of the political blogosphere, Pajamas Media thinks its daily blog picks will be of a higher quality than automated services like Memeorandum or keyword aggregators like Technorati.

“Technorati is a search engine; it’s all technology. We are going to highlight blogs that we think are good for quality reasons,” said Simon.

The site, which is limited to political bloggers now, is slated to become a blog portal for all kinds of subjects, including a lifestyle section. That would put it in competition with established blog networks like Gawker Media.

Gawker publisher Nick Denton had little to say about the future competition. “Since I don’t know too much about it I’d rather reserve making a comment,” he said.