PhotoDude.com

Thu. Nov 17, 2005

A New Blog Conglomeration

Whether you heard about the launch of Open Source Media yesterday probably says more about you than it does about them. If you haven’t a clue what or who they are, that means you’re a normal American not obsessed with something called the Blogosphere. Congratulations.

Others were all over it yesterday, even “live blogging” their festive “grand opening” event at the Rainbow Room. For some reason, Judith Miller was there. Maybe she was the pinata, I don’t know.

I guess I fall somewhere in between these two groups, as I’m writing about it a day late. But the truth is that a site like that takes some time to shake out into a consistent form. Grand openings mean little. I remember when the Huffington Post first started up, I thought it looked like it might be pretty good. But I was wrong. Most of the time, it is a half step above a celebrity circle jerk.

It’s possible that OSM could end up the same thing … with less celebrities.

But I won’t yet make any judgement about the content at OSM. Because, frankly, there doesn’t appear to be much yet. Their home page navigation focuses you first on their Advisory Board, Staff, Press Room, etc. Then you see they’ve got a massive blogroll that includes everybody under the sun. Well, except me, of course.

And then finally some sidebar links to topical content. But when you start clicking around on those content categories like Politics, Business, etc. ... you get news wire stories. Like you can get most anywhere. Maybe I’m confused about what OSM is supposed to be, or is going to become, but I don’t appear to be alone in that. However, I’ll check back to see if they start offering significant content that I can’t get somewhere else.

Of course, with not much else original to read, I looked over their Privacy & Terms of Use page. Now, I understand the concept of standard boilerplate legal notices, but this is a bit odd on a blog, especially one that calls itself “Open Source”:

“You may not reproduce, distribute, copy, publish, enter into any database, display, modify, create derivative works, transmit, or in any way exploit any part of this site. The only exceptions to this are that you may download material from Our Site for your own personal use, provided such download is limited to making one machine readable copy and/or one print copy that limited to occasional articles of personal interest only. No other use of the content of Our Site is permitted.”

Boilerplate and blogs do not mix. In a strict legal parsing, it looks to me like the above means I cannot quote a sentence from OSM on my web site without violating their terms of use. It wouldn’t be a violation of copyright laws, as bloggers trigger the “fair use” clauses of reproducing for the purposes of critique, commentary, or education.

But it would violate the posted terms of use at OSM. Guys, have a lawyer who’s a blogger run an edit on that. I understand you know a few.

And once you’ve gone through the content, such as it currently is, there’s the presentation. It’s a mixed bag. I will say that I like the overall appearance a lot better than Huffington Post, but it’s a table heavy layout that Failed validation with 182 errors. Huffington Post makes far less use of tables, and Fails validation, 22 errors.

When it comes to validation, nobody’s perfect 100% of the time (3 errors, caused by new feed URL’s). The point is to try. When you see a center tag on the Huffington Post home page, and OSM using a nested 7 cell table to spell out a seven letter word in color (heard of JPG’s?), well, that’s not trying.