Bloodless Coup

Can you say crash and burn, boys and girls?

The whole Pajamas Media thing gets curioser and curioser by the hour. In the search for a name with more gravitas, they switched to Open Source Media. Should have done some googling first, however. Steve Gilliard has a post about this, with links to Open Source Media a PRI show.

Confused? So were they, when some listeners emailed in to report that someone else (the Pajamas folk) was claiming to be Open Source Media. Summarizing the whole thing would take too long, and of course, due to the restrictive user agreement [any copying, using, displaying, reproducing, anything from their site is verboten, i.e. no fair use, even though they sustain themselves by reproducing things from other people's web sites] on the Pajama/OSM site, I'm not going to even get into it.

Read the five part blog from Open Source (the radio show): Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.

Now, here at Bloodless Coup we know there are other "Bloodlesses" out there, including our other publication, the Bloodless Coup 'Zine (which should have a new issue out in a month or so). Bloodless Coop hatched about three weeks before we registered our domain name. He's got a blogspot page, a different sort of focus, and a barnyard flair. We check each other out periodically, blogroll each other, and exchange friendly neighbor nods. For awhile there was another blogspot (thinkengine.blogspot.com) blog that called itself "Bloodless Coup" as a title, which honked me off briefly, but Baltar advised patience and predicted it would "die a natural death" as there never was much activity there in the first place. He was right. So, no real issues, just the friendly Coop.

After the Pajamas/OSM thing, I just checked to see what was up with BloodlessCoup .net and .org, since I hadn't had a look in a couple of months. There was nothing at .net, so to be safe, we bought it. Then I discovered there is something new at .org. It's got domain name forwarding to a comcast site, so basically the .org site points to the comcast. The .net was purchased last month, and we haven't heard a thing from them. No idea how long the comcast has been there.

It's funny how you never really think about this stuff, even the web savvy, who should. A regular-reader (Morris?) once chastised us for having an outdated name. And I responded, "yes, it is" because Bloodless Coup has been the name of my band since about 1986. Baltar argues with me over whether or not the modal category of existence for the band is "mythical" as opposed to "irregular," but in many ways, I have been - at least to myself - Bloodless Coup for about twenty years now. I've known Baltar for ten years, Armand for five. The recent incarnation of Bloodless Coup as the three of us started with talk of reviving the band as a trio (we're still working on it, but it's looking more like quartet at this point), and then morphed into the band website, the zine, and then the blog. Different form, same bloodless(ness).

So, I suppose that in the context of the Pajamas/Open Source situation, the question is: how do we feel about other Bloodless Coups? I like the way things are between us and the Bloodless Coop. We each have our own "personality," we blogroll each other, read each other, occasionally comment, and it's like finding a long lost cousin with the same name or something. I'm curious to see what happens with the .org Bloodless Coup. I am a little peeved again that someone would not take the time to send a heads up this way when setting up the .org site, especially when it looks to be getting made into a political blog. After all when Google searching bloodlesscoup we are the first six (and 8 of the top 10) hits and the top 2 when searching "bloodless coup" (darn those real coups in Libya and Mauritania). [And yes, when I registered the .com, I checked to make sure there were no other bloodlesscoup anythings.] If the .org gets going, it would be nice to have evident differentiation, at least some acknowledgement and a redirect link. That being said, the same kind of relationship we have with the Coop would be even nicer.

As for Pajamas/OSM and the First Open Source Media, well, I'd be pretty pissed if I were the public radio folks. They've applied for trademark, they registered the domain name, they have a friggin' radio show. And the Pajamas people supposedly have millions of dollars, teams of lawyers, venture capitalitalists, and the brightest minds of the blogosphere behind the project. Meaning what? They are setting themselves up as professionals, and some of the people involved have been blogging for a long time. They should know better than to move ahead without doing their homework. What they did with the retractions and corrections does not reflect well on their enterprise. It's shady, slippery, and if I had given them $3.5 million dollars I'd be yelling that somebody's "got some 'splainin' to do."

UPDATE: I last checked his blog a couple of weeks ago, and should have known to check back before this post. Dennis the Peasant proves that hell hath no fury like an ex-partner scorned. Stop in and read all the way down.

Posted by binky at November 18, 2005 11:16 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Blogorama