Tech Review

Scott helped me when I started blogging by fixing a plug-in that allowed people to send posts as emails. All he asked in return is to help his friends at Astonish me. I appreciated his assistance very much.

Scott is now trying out for a show called "The Best Job in the World." TBJITW is supposed to be taking care of an island which we all know is a lie (below).

Scott's Canadian. Supporting him, therefore, is difficult considering what they did to Captain James Lawrence and because of Howie Mandel. On the other hand, Pamela Anderson. His charity tips the scales in his favor.

Pamela Anderson, Canada's greatest cultural achievement.

Go here to view his web page and here to vote him on the island.

I received an email from Pajamas Media telling me that PM will dissolve it's blog network, of which I'm currently a part. Some have weighed in on the demise of the blog section of PM. Atlas Shrugs makes the point that PM should have only had conservative content. I don't know. I remember hearing that only 8% of people actually enjoy reading contrary opinions, but I doubt that the few liberal articles in the main section and liberal blogs on the blogroll like Balloon Juice caused so much psychic pain to the PM surfer that he would have had to click away in horror, never to return.

Protein Wisdom is worried about his future financial viability:

What this means is that as of April 1, I am officially out of work. So save going to a pay model, this site will likely have to shut down.

Although they don't have Sitemeter on their site, I calculate that PW gets about $100.00 a month from PM. That's nothing to sneeze at, but anybody who can write a topic sentence should be able to scratch by with $100.00 less, and that's assuming that he won't be able to replace his income with adsense or some other blog advertising service. I, for one, call your bluff, Mr. Wisdom, and bet that you'll be blogging in April.

Scorned Gates of Vienna, the first blog I ever read and one of the few bloggers who actually replies to emails from blog newbies, is serving itself a large cup of Schadenfreude.

I liked being part of PM. They paid me some money, published an article of mine, and gave me a sense of pride at having been deemed acceptable to them as a writer. I've also met many of the PM people at Blogworld and found them very nice, especially Aaron, Ed Driscoll, Sybilla, and Stephen Green.

Here was their problem:

Pajamas Media has seemed ashamed of its reason for existence, being a hub for independent-minded conservative blogs by the kind of writers who may not have the connections or time to make it in mainstream media, but who nonetheless have talent.

PM aspired to be more National Review Online than even NRO. NRO is a collection of articles by world-class conservatives who didn't start out as bloggers and a very popular blog, the Corner, itself attractive for its conversational tone and fun banter.

For the time being, Pajamas Media is a collection of articles written by people who, except for Victor Hanson, neither go on television nor write for magazines or newspapers; in other words, by people who are only successful in the blogging world. There are a few internal, but otherwise completely independent and isolated blogs in its "PajamasXpress" section. The "Network Bloggers" section is nothing but a blog roll. There's no sense of community. Nobody talks or links to each other. There's no forum; not even a place where you can see what PM bloggers are writing.

The front page of Pajamas Media should have been a collection of the best blog posts of the day, as chosen by somebody with good taste.

Roger Simon, PM's founder, didn't realize that the most successful new media opinion site, the Daily Kos, is a collection of posts- it feels like a blog. Real Clear Politics is similar in that it's a one-stop view of the what's hot in established-opinion articles. Politico and Huffington Post are close to what Pajamas Media wanted to be, but Politico is more of a news site than an opinion one, with real reporters, AP headlines, etc., and HuffPO centers around an aggregated blog.

If Roger Simon had made a site like Robinson and Long, which is essentially a feed aggregator, he'd have saved tons of money and gotten a lot more hits.

PJTV prospects:

Ironically, the most interesting thing on PJTV is VodkaPundit Stephen Green's segment where he "reads all the blogs so you don't have to." In other words, he's kind of "aggregating" all of the best blogs, Now there's a great idea!

Anyways, I still like Pajamas Media and I hope they do well. I'll subscribe to PJTV for a month and let you know if it's worth it. I'll have a link to their blogroll on which I hope to stay. If they need my puss on TV, I'm there.

Plus side:

PM's ads are in php which means that they use more resources than Adsense's HTML ads. They also have other effects which slow down my site.