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November 22, 2005

Notes from Ferdy - The Whole OSM Thing

Don Surber has a round-up of reactions to the Open Source Media project. Included is the story of the co-founder left behind in the dust, a possibly-unintended snub to a major player, and more than one post about the general confusion and lack of direction.

The biggest problem with the whole thing is that when you put a bunch of middle-class humans in the same room with several million dollars, they immediately go insane. The same problem occurs when you let a bunch of cats loose in the meat department at Jewel/Osco. Most of the meat will be gone when it's over, but it sure as heck won't have happened very efficiently.

The lack of direction is not surprising. Bruce has been involved in several start-up businesses, and more often than not, the process of finding customers and investors has a larger effect on the product than the original idea. It's also dangerous to partner with people who live in a different part of the country: when you're face to face with somebody, they're important. When all you have is EMAIL, it's psychologically easier to fire the guy than it is to explain to him why you're going in a new direction.

What separates blogging from other media is that you can be successful with a negligible investment. Because it's web-based, you can add new features with minimal risk. Nine times out of ten they'll be a bust, but that tenth time can be pure gold: never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that the dinky labor-saving tool Bruce put together one afternoon would be our most popular feature, or that our main search engine phrase would be fake msn virus.

Like the Huffington Post, OSM is an attempt to apply large amounts of money to a medium designed for doing things on the cheap. There are going to be problems, and there are going to be fights, and no matter how far into the future you push the launch date, it's going to be six months too soon.

I don't make these rules: I just try to figure them out.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Tue 1:33 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (1) | More Notes from Ferdy

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