I didn't pay much attention to this the first few times I saw it, just an attempt to pad the acres of whitespace that is OSM, a content Kalihari. Surely, I thought, they'll change this soon. With 70 trumpeted "best of" bloggers, promoted from hundreds found less worthy, I expected a rotation of pithy quotes, bon mots and wingnut zingers from the blogstars. But no, this turgid prose has hung there like a festering rat impaled on spines by a Loggerhead Shrike. Finally, it demands a moment of examination. Okay, done. It is pompous gobbledygook of the illiterate kind.
Along with the genre-garbled shotgun newsfeeds, the astoundingly boring mono-topic layout, the fact that OSM is platformed on an Open Source (free) application by Zope, hardly modified, you really have to wonder:
Other than the lavish party, where has the money gone?
Not on the blog, that's for sure.
Little Green Footballs
Monday, November 21, 2005
Signs
Posted by Anonymous at 05:51
3 comments:
Tammy Bruce makes it all sound like the French Revolution.
Of course there is much wrong with the "MSM" (as these chaps insist on calling it), but if OSM were really storming the Bastille (as their acolytes seem to think they are) would the OSM site look like it does?
Flat. No punch.
I tend to agree with Jeff Jarvis. Just cut the crap about balance and just come out as right wing version of the Huff Post. They will then at least be somewhere. At the moment they are on the road to nowhere.
Its ironic too that Tammy talks about an "elite" and the "unwashed masses" but it's OSM that has tried to create an elite. 70 OSM blogs, an Editorial Board full of right wingers, with news feeds endorsed by the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party.
It's a curiously elitist model considering these are supposedly such democracy loving anti-elitist types.
Bruce's garbled homily is also a perfect example of the Republican "victim" groupspeak, wherein the in-power right-wingers constantly moan about oppression as they opress others. But other than laughing at the overwrought stupidity of the prose, it's the fact that it hasn't been changed that fascinates me. I mean, if it were your blog, and some sucker had given you millions, wouldn't you be editing, tuning, refining every moment? It's hard to know what the dynamic between Squeaky and The Hat is, but a guess would be The Hat as an ineffective "Brownie" type, fussing about his Hollywood business, lunching out on the whole OSM thing with nutballs like Lionel Chetwynd and Ron Silver. Squeaky, meanwhile, has reaffirmed his commitment to LGF, which requires constant attention lest the Johnson-worshipping "Lizardoid Minions" feel neglected. Johnson is a god-like figure to them and he, in turn, needs their constant admiration as expressed in countless proclamations of fealty and adoration. It is very sick. So between the socially occupied butterfly Simon, and the glowering "Lizardoid Master", parsing the LGF comments in real-time, is it any wonder that no-one is actually doing any work at OSM?
SK.
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