Utility/futility

Kip Esquire wonders what is the point of Open Source Media Pajamas Media:

As I understand it, the purpose of Pajamas Media is to bring together the bloggers that everyone already knows about so that people will, um, know about them.

Think about that.

What exactly does Pajamas Media accomplish that my aggregator, or Google, doesn't? I can tell you what my aggregator accomplishes that Pajamas Media doesn't. My aggregator lets me add or subtract bloggers that I do or do not find interesting. My aggregator lets me save clippings from blogs so I can read them later. My aggregator lets me easily filter through what topics I consider important or unimportant, rather than being told by some "compilation staff" what I should be reading (all the news that's fit to print, provided it comes from "important bloggers" and makes it past Pajama Media's "compilation staff" — yes, a vast improvement over the MSM).

And my aggregator lets me do this for free and without ads (unless the blogs themselves insert the ads into their RSS feeds — a filthy habit, incidentally).

So I ask again: how exactly does Pajamas Media create utility rather than destroy it? What does it provide that adds to, rather than detracts from, the blogreading experience?

The consensus seems to agree with me (one example here). The death of Pajamas Media looks like a question not of if, but when.

As soon as they burn their way through the $3.5m funding they somehow managed to blag I reckon

[via Catallarchy]

See also Jim Lowney's very amusing description of OSM's launch party.

Comments

[Dick OBrien]

Lowney's piece is classic. Have to say, I've found the whole Pajamas saga endlessly entertaining.

[Frank McGahon]

I'm still baffled as to how they managed to score 3 and a half mil (a million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real money)- pity the fool that lent them that...

[Dick OBrien]

Well there still seems to be lots of VCs who'll take a punt. Although I'd have little time for the guys behind it, even I thought it would be better than this. The other thing is that they started working on this venture not long after the whole Dan Rather affair. Blogs were hot then and people were making all sorts of predictions. Looks like the investors believed the hype.