Editor & Publisher is previewing an article from next Sunday’s New York Times to be titled “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Michael Crowley evidently concludes that blogs on the Right do a better job of using their on-line soap-boxes to influence the public debate, while liberal blogs primarily just talk to liberal audiences. We knew that already.

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Ho, ho! The contemptible Atrios is blogging indignantly, in his usual foul-mouthed manner, and in extreme looney-tune-leftist paranoid mode about how it wouldn’t even matter

If all the wingnut blogs disappeared tomorrow it really wouldn’t have any impact on the national discourse. Sure they’re there and the Right is better at using them but they don’t really *need* them

Because we’ve got on our side, according to the addled Atrios,

both the massive right wing media

(Let’s see: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News [sort of], and the Manchester Union-Leader]

and the mainstream media.

Welcome NY Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, 5000 other papers, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, HBO and Showtime, Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the NY Review of Books, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and these days, Fly Rod & Reel and Field & Stream, all former leftist MSM stalwarts to the Right!

Poor Little Atrios alone on the barricades with only, what? the Daily Worker? Mother Jones? CounterPunch? on his side.

Seasonal unmelted humor posted by Seneca the Younger (who typo’d reindeer) on YARGB.

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Yet Another Really Great — Flares Into Darkness is a very new group blog, only slightly older than ourselves (YARGB: 17 Sep 2005 vs. NYM: 29 Oct 2005). We think YARGB is most interesting new blog we’ve come upon in a long time, and we intend to look in regularly.

We were busy with other things, and fell behind on PJM coverage. A good summary which brings things pretty nicely up-to-date has been written by Mister Snitch.

Any undertaking on this scale, involving significant numbers of creative and temperamental people, was bound to feature conflict, drama, break-ups, and feuding. The newly launched site did prove surprisingly unfinished, and functionality, content, and organization were all initially wanting, but it’s easy to see that, bit-by-bit, improvements are occuring. I suppose the fundamental problem has been that producing one blog is very time-consuming, and the PJM principals have all continued to run their own renowned, popular, and important blogs, and have been consequently only left-handedly developing PJM. Skeptics need to remember that the PJM organization does include a very major share of the best talent existing in blogging. Those betting negatively over on PJM Death Pool may well wind up disappointed.

Responding to recent humiliating demotions in Ecosytem Rankings, many much-lower-on-the evolutionary-ladder bloggers are probably feeling that TTLB is really lower than themselves, that TTLB ought to be saying of itself, as Julianne (played by Julia Roberts) said in My Best Friend’s Wedding:

JULIANNE
I am pond scum.

No… Actually. Lower. I am the fungus
that feeds on pond scum. Lower.
The layer of mucous that cruds up
the fung…

MICHAEL
Lower.

JULIANNE
(agreeing)
Lower.

MICHAEL
The pus that infects the mucous
that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum.

(Trace of a smile)

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Kidding around aside, the big change, as far as is visible, seems to have amounted simply to a renumbering of how many links make a blog a this instead of a that. My Top Posts has always not worked, and still doesn’t. My link count has gone up, rather than than down, the opposite of my location on the food chain, but some links (including prominent ones like NRO (which produced 6K hits in one day) have never apparently been listed or counted, but TTLB’s count is still higher than Technorati’s. Go figure.

Michael Massing in the last New York Review of Books contemplates with alarm, in the first of a projected two-part chin-stroking series, the continuing assault on the credibility of the MSM by a spectrum of alternative Conservative information sources, including AM talk radio, Fox News, and the Conservative Blogosphere, and laments the ever-diminishing readership of major newspapers:

while more than 70 percent of older Americans read a newspaper every day, fewer than 20 percent of young Americans do. As a result, he writes, “America is facing the greatest exodus of informed citizenship in its history.”

All this is very bad, you see, because:

If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power.

Frankly, old boy, complacent Establishment organs like the NY Times, the NYRB, CBS News, and the rest of the MSM look an awful lot like those in power to me. I’m strongly tempted to insert an MP3 at this point of Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Hat tip to Eugene Volokh who wryly responds to the NYRB’s lamentations by noting mistakes typical of MSM-reporting in the same article.

The Truth Laid Bear bit the Blogosphere today, when its proprietor began implementing plans to eliminate counts of open trackbacks, and other forms of blogger cooperation in raising the status of individual blogs, toward ecosystem ratings and top posts. TTLB results are in complete shambles at present.

Glenn Reynolds, eat your heart out. Higher Beings are currently being reported to be:

1.Cold Fury (62) details
2.Caterina.net (62) details
3.http://www.ospolitics.org/ (62) details
4.Inter Alia (62) details
5.Times & Seasons (62) details
6.Writing for the Web (62) details
7.Go Dubya! (62) details
8.Freedom Nation (62) details
9. Cor ad cor loquitur (62) details
10.Hypocrisy and Hypotheses… an acute angle in an obtuse world (62) details

Three out of ten of which are dead links.

But what do we know? We’ve regressed to Multicellar Microorganism.

We were warned this was coming yesterday by James Joyner. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Irate bloggers can be found starting with Don Surber.

The unaussprechlichen FrankJ is waging war on Glenn Reynolds, you see. The origins and history of this terrible conflict are described here:

Blogging is a hobby of pure ego, whose purpose is to 1) see your words in print, and 2) have other people read them. Currently, one blogger, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) gets far more page views and links than any other, and deservedly so. Glen updates MANY times per day, and his links are usually well worth clicking. However, he normally offers very little of his own commentary. Sometimes just a cursory “indeed” or “hmmm”.

Because he has so many readers, if he links to your site you get a LOT of hits, which is very gratifying. His links are highly prized by bloggers.

Frank J., of IMAO, is an up-and-coming blogger who occasionally mocks Glenn as a way to gain attention. His first method was making up outrageous lies: Glenn puts puppies in blenders and drinks them; Glenn murders hobos for fun; Glenn worships Satan; Glenn is a communist spy who does the robot dance; Glenn punched Frank J.

Later, Frank attempted to get Google to bring up Glenn’s site if the terms “liberal assclown” were entered. Results were mixed.

His latest attempt was to “declare war” on Glenn and asking bloggers to choose sides. Frank’s side is the Blogging Alliance, Glenn’s supporters are the Axis of Naughty. It’s all in good fun, and much entertaining mockery and gratuitous linkage will ensue as a result.

One of FrankJ’s allies, Harvey, has composed an indictment not to be missed by connoisseurs of Blogospheric humor.

It may not be a good sign that a PJM Death Pool is up and running. Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Gordon Smith analyses whether Roger L. Simon actually formed a partnership with Dennis the Peasant. By some curious coincidence, hat tip to Ann Althouse.

More than we needed to know department: the frazzled Dennis spills his urine jar.

There is very lame satire to be had from a link supplied by left-wing stalkers of LGF, and slightly more amusing material here.

Better humor: It’s alive! Hat tip to Charles Johnson.
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As to PJM itself, it’s been a week now, and apart from the name change, little seems to be happening. There is a site, whose organization leaves much to be desired, and whose content is very disappointing. Images of one not-very-enthusiastic web programming temp worker in an incubator office in Cleveland come to mind when one tries to imagine who is really running it all.

Best of the Blogs remains a wildly over-optimistic claim. I even tried to help this morning by tipping them off to one of my own more amusing posts, and the result was:

This site encountered an error trying to fulfill your request. The errors were:

Error Type
ValueError
Error Value
invalid literal for int(): 1?tip_confirm=Thanks for the tip?tip_confirm=Thanks for the tip
Request made at
2005/11/23 07:33:01 US/Pacific

I keep hoping somebody is going to start kicking butts and getting things into gear over there.

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EARLIER REPORTS

Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon have responded to naming conflicts and reader disapproval by abandoning the corporately-imposed moniker Open Source Media and going back to the old name Pajamas Media. As one can tell by this blog’s title, I think an insult turned around makes a good blog name.

Ann Althouse takes the occasion to get one in on the still-unresolved content quality issue. Girls can be so mean.

And wouldn’t you know it? Here’s Dennis the Peasant ragging on them too.

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EARLIER REPORTS.

Dennis the Peasant aka Kenton Kelly reveals his side of the story.

About the dog.

Earlier battle report from Dennis.

Dennis responds to Roger by outing himself.

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Ann Althouse podcast for 47 minutes. Essentially, she’s happy enough with her blog advertising now. She expressed skepticism about rosy promises. Roger Simon was not persuasive at recruiting over the phone. He emphasized financial aspects too much. She places a very high value on the ethos of blogging and independence. When they failed to agree, he ended by hanging up on her.

Ms. Althouse says that she was attacked in Little Green Footballs (I believe it had to have been in Comments), and she blames the proprietor (I think mistakenly) for loosing his minions on her. I get abusive attacks in my Comments, and I’m the proprietor, so I don’t think it’s a question of anybody encouraging anyone.

Ms. Althouse had a certain amount of fun about the quality and selection of material currently featured on OSM. She suggested that it might have been better to do a soft launch, and perfect and improve operations in front of a much smaller limited release, early-adopter audience.

Ms. Althouse’s opinions were presented informally and digressively in the course of a lengthy stream-of-consciousness, ex tempore podcast, which format may be relied upon to preclude their wide dissemination.

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Richard Bennett identifies a defender of Roger L. Simon as Roger’s wife.

Blogs4God has linked some of the latest reports, including ours.

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FrankJ sums up the current situation.

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EARLIER REPORTS.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway supplies a very informative collection of reactions and opinions on the launch of the new bloggers’ consortium.

Iowahawk adds a precis today (11/18) of the ” new multi-aspect business concept in which many of the top superstar and mega-hyper superstars of the internet blogosphere have formed a powerful alliance to create shareholder value, and piss off Ann Althouse. ”

Ms. Althouse is not amused, and takes a hard-core reductionist view of the plot:

In Phase A, various important blogosphere blogs are coerced into a mutual non-aggression pact under the auspices of the OSM directorate. This is very similar to NATO, but French people are excluded. In Phase number B, there is large alcohol party in New York, which is an important center for media business discussions. In Phase 3, the system creates values, which are translated into very large checks for everybody. In Phase number D, I drive my new yacht, the “Ha Ha Ha,” to a tax-free Caribbean island.

Dennis the Peasant is also very anti OSM and is blogging defiance. Roger L. Simon (11/19) explains Dennis’ dudgeon.

The notorious Frank J. (11/19) offers the consolatory promise to all of us without stock options: when I get my yacht, I’ll let you all look at it.

As promised, the Open Source Media site opened this morning. Many of the most talented voices in the Blogosphere have been involved in this project, and I expect this will quickly prove to be an essential source of news and opinion, one of those first stops on the Information Superhighway every morning.

Congratulations to Roger Simon, Chuck Johnson, and the many others leading the way into a better future.